A Rather Monstrous World
by TsukimotoMana
Summary: Warning: Graphic depictions of violence. Dub-con. In an alternate universe, a nation resembling feudal Japan, cut off from the rest of the world, gets attacked by modern type troops. Izaya is a citizen who gets captured in their overwhelming first attack, while Shizuo is a front-line soldier. Yaoi.
1. Chapter 1

**A Rather Monstrous World**

**Prologue**

It is generally believed that when mist covers everything, the world will suddenly turn more mysterious and perhaps a bit scarier. It's one of the rare times that the Underworld emerges and mingles with the Surface, allowing the dead to pay a long awaited visit to the living. However, the most fearsome beings to be wary of at such a time, are not the ghosts of the dead. And that is because there is nothing a dead man can do more than a living one. The beings that truly must be worthy of a human's fear are the beings who are able to do more than he would ever be. Thus, meaning, the Gods or the Monsters.

At the time the change happened, maybe a God was watching. And if he did, he would truly be a merciless God. Neither the one who punishes the evil, nor the one who protects the innocent, he would be the most merciless kind of all; a mere observer, watching calamities unfold with zero interest, passing him by through the course of history just like many others had before.

Because God didn't do anything as the quiet waters of the sea roiled up, embracing something enormous, foreign, akin to nothing the waters of that shore had ever embraced before. He didn't do anything as a man inside the mist sighed and let his warm breath mix with the humidity around him, he didn't do anything when the slow breeze messed a mass of blond hair through his path.

Maybe, maybe if he would have done something, maybe if he hadn't let that something be driven ashore where nothing else of its kind ever had before, maybe it would have all been for the best.

**Chapter One**

Orihara Izaya was a man of dubious reputation around a quite wide area of his beloved homeland, maybe a wider one than he had originally intended to, but he always had and always would welcome a bit of a challenge. For many people he was a well mannered, kind and ambitious young man who had all the potential to hit it big and deserve it in the future. For others, and this time meaning the unfortunate people who knew him more than a month, he was a prick. For those who had truly picked the wrong end of the stick in life, for various reasons, he was devil incarnate. It was a fact for everyone though that he was working as an informant for one of the most prestigious Yakuza families in Sekai, the Awakusu-Kai, and he was plenty shady as it was.

Izaya himself never bothered with what other people thought of him, unless of course he could use that knowledge to his advantage depending on the case he'd have to face. Regardless of that matter, he loved other people. Izaya loved humans. Not humans as individuals, he had actually never felt true liking or attraction towards anybody up to this point of his life, but he was fascinated with the essence of human nature. He especially loved seeing other people's faces stricken with grief, desperation, agony and emptiness. Causing those expressions was the best drug and most fun Izaya could ever have and someone could say that his profession was modeled after his preferences.

Sometimes it bothered Izaya to think that the human world might be too small. After all, it only consisted out of an enormous piece of earth, surrounded by a seemingly quiet sea, but as soon as a boat would try to step a bit farther away from the usual fishing zones, ridiculously strong winds and wild waves would crush them like tree leaves. There was a story once according to which the wind was so strong that it took a boat along with its fishermen and crashed it right back at some rocks on a beach of the mainland. Basically, the human world, Sekai, as its people were calling it, was only a rather big island. Izaya was wondering from time to time of what might exist beyond the winds but he quickly dismissed the thought, thinking that there were more humans to observe in Sekai than he would ever be able to in his lifetime. Nevertheless, he possessed quite a grand amount of curiosity so the issue was coming back and forth to his head quite often.

Sekai was a quite nice place to live, in addition to all of the above. The people had a rather developed civilization and a moral code that allowed them to live in prosperity. Their meals consisted mainly of rice and fish, men and women were walking around in their traditional outfits, a very elaborate type of robes called yukatas and kimonos respectively, in the center of each village or city, buying jewelry or eating traditional foods and sweets. When night would come, they would use fire lamps to fend off the darkness. They were using horses and carriages for their travels and they had developed a rather artistic style of warfare using blades, specifically swords called katanas and daggers called kunais. Izaya personally preferred to use kunais, they were easy to hide and they suited his personality better. One needed to be able to protect himself when he was working for the Yakuza and furthermore, when his life goal was to make other people's lives miserable.

That day he had traveled to a quite distant village from the city he was living into, due to business. He had a not so interesting human he was supposed to meet, but he still had an entertaining use for him. As he was leaving, his wife, Namie, didn't fail to remind him that it would be better for everyone in this world but especially for her if he never came back. Their marriage was strictly for keeping up social appearances, since both of them were over 25 years old, and honestly, it suited both of them. It was their common secret that Namie had a thing for her little brother, her unforgivable and incestuous feelings being where Izaya could gladly step on and use to make her do his bidding. Surprisingly, though, their characters turned out to be rather compatible. Despite the rough start, they ended up getting quite along. Izaya had a wife as it was normally expected of him even though he didn't want what that would entail and the same thing but for other reasons applied to Namie as well. And of course, sexual intercourse was out of the question from both sides. And even though both knew that from the start, Namie felt the need to remind him every day that if he ever dared to make a move of that kind, she would castrate him with her bare hands. Honestly, it hurt Izaya a little bit to hear that. Almost as much as when she used to threaten him that she would poison his tea, as she would choose the role of the widow over the one of the wife any day anytime.

Izaya thought that he probably didn't hate her as much as she hated him, but he still hated her nonetheless – even so, he often relied on her and confided in her as well so he thought that maybe he could buy her an elegant hairpin when he would be done with his job, if only to just irritate her; this village was near the sea and it was famous for using sea shells for beautiful hairpins. He knew because his twin little sisters, Kururi and Mairu, had told him so while begging him to buy them several. He never especially liked them.

He waited for his peculiar date for no more than five minutes at the village's main street when the other man showed up. He was an ordinary man with an ordinary troubled and full of disdain face. Nothing bored Izaya more than the completely ordinary. "Hello, Kimura-san!" He chirped though, in a tone that only a very trained near him person could have detected as fake. "Sorry for taking all the trouble in coming here, I'm sure that must have been tough!"

"Shut the fuck up, Orihara." The other guy fastened his pace while his face clouded up even more. "You know very well what kind of-"

"Oh yeah, yeah, I know, I can assure you." Izaya interrupted him and his kind smile gave its place to a malicious smirk. "The way you're coming to me so desperate in order to protect your family, nobody would guess you would be the kind of man to have two kids with another woman, ah, but what's life I guess!" Izaya took a dramatic pose while he stuck out his hand and the other man slapped a closed envelope over it, in a moment of unparalleled fury.

"You scum, you do realize into what danger I'm putting myself by giving this to you? I swear, if you dare to screw up…!"

"Uh-uh-uh, Kimura-san, you should be more careful about exactly whom you are calling scum. Though I might not exactly be the perfect being on this Earth either, hearing it from you really loses all kind of spice." Izaya's eyes shone dangerously and perhaps a bit playfully as he slid the envelope inside his dark red, almost brown yukata over his chest.

The other man's eyes scanned carefully the cursed being in front of him. With Izaya being an unexceptionably good looking person, it made him even more hateful to the other's eyes. He was of an average height, rather slim but well built additionally – rumors were saying that he was escaping assassins and other dangerous elements by jumping over from roof to roof or from one tree to another. His skin was unmarred, his eyes were narrow but charming, as the dark brown color inside was always like it was spitting lights, and his hair was short and silky black. His nose was straight and his chin was small, so, even if he was not feminine, neither in his face nor in his manners, he could easily choose to disguise as one. Through his rage, the other man made a not so far from his thoughts association:

"You should be fucked raw right on the ground." He almost whispered it, boiling with hatred. In his eyes, that was what the other guy in front of him deserved; fucked until he pleaded and begged for forgiveness for all of the crimes he had ever committed before, just like now that he was trying to destroy his family.

"Heeh… You say some interesting things." Izaya narrowed his eyes. It wasn't the first time something like that was being said to him, and anyway, he felt like killing some time playing for a bit. "Then, should I say that you deserve your head to blow up right here right now and paint everything a pretty red? You know, just go BOOM-"

Maybe there was a deafening sound, maybe there was no sound at all. The other man's body violently shook as it got trashed on the side, while blood gashed out of the right side of his head. Izaya remained as he was before, staring blankly at the empty space of air where his interlocutor was previously standing. Time had frozen solid and Izaya didn't realize at that point that by the moment it started running again, eons could have passed by. Later he would deduce that this was the sensation when an era leaves you and a completely new one takes its place.

The screech of a woman brought him back from the shock. He forced his head to look down and saw the boring man's body lying down, bathing in blood, and ending to something that previously must have been his head, but now it was just a lump of brains, bones and meat. "Wha…" He barely managed to utter. Surely he thought of himself above all of his other beloved humans, but even he wasn't at a point where he could just wish something and for that something to happen…

And, then, all hell broke loose.

The deafening sound was heard again. This time, the woman near him who had previously screeched, fell down, clutching her stomach and producing a rather incoherent sound. She was sprawled lifeless on the ground moments later, and Izaya saw that a huge hole was suddenly carved through her. Then the sound was heard once again and another passer-by screamed as his left hand detached itself from him. And then many sounds were heard from many directions, mixing with the human screams like the God from above them was playing darts and he was just aiming and shooting on a whim. Izaya just stood there for some moments, while everyone else around him were confused and screaming and running towards any direction they could think of but they had no way of knowing where might have been safe or dangerous. And as the God continued his cruel game and Izaya saw someone coughing up blood and trying to gather his intestines from his slashed open belly, he forced himself to think that if something or someone was really aiming at them and hitting them with something, maybe the wisest choice would have been to take shelter inside some house.

Knowing that there would be no house that would open its door at such a time and that he'd lose valuable time trying to force himself in, he ran towards his favorite and well known back alleys of the village, to thin and dark spaces he knew so very well because of his shady job. The noise was growing even bigger by the second and his survival instincts were telling him that the danger did accordingly. As he was running, he felt multiple times the sensation of something passing him by at enormous speed, something like an arrow but insanely quicker and invisible as well. When he finally reached the backstreets, he hid behind a house's wooden wall and he finally dared to look behind him at the main street. Blood had painted everything crimson and corpses had already started piling up all over the big road. The injured ones who were desperately trying to find some place safe, were also completely blown up some seconds later. It was truly Hell on Earth. Izaya never particularly believed in God but it wasn't like he didn't believe either. After all, knowing that the death was the absolute end, was too scary of a thought. But even with death unfolding in such way right in front of him, the adrenaline running through his veins wouldn't allow him to think about it. He only thought about it the next moments, when the world finally became too surreal to be tolerated.

Creatures started making their appearance down the street. They were all green, carrying big, black sticks on their arms with a very peculiar shape. "MONSTERS! MONSTERS!" Was heard all over the place from the remaining survivors and Izaya cursed them inwardly for not being able to keep their mouths shut, like they were asking to be found. He then wondered if Namie had indeed poisoned his tea that morning and those were just the final hallucinations until he'd find his way towards the Underworld. Maybe a part of him wished for it to be so. The creatures had a humanoid appearance, they had arms and legs and a torso but their head wasn't a human's head. It reminded Izaya of the head of a fly, with two enormous black eyes covering both of its sides and something like a rope hanging from where the nose should be. He could see no mouths.

So… how would those creatures eat them?

Izaya could feel the blood draining from his face. "Hey, hey, you've got to be kidding me, God." He whispered to himself, as a weak and scared smile appeared on his face. "This can't be real, can it?" Even though he considered himself to be a brave man, he had to fight to suppress the tremble that threatened to take over him, and he even had to lean completely over the wooden wall. He wondered how long it would be until they discovered his hiding place. Fear wasn't an emotion he was glad to accept. In fact, he rarely ever felt afraid. Izaya Orihara was a smart and calculating man, and even if he was involved in a rather dangerous business, he almost always had a great percentage of control over each presented situation. But now this was outside every possible calculation he could have ever made. Now this was so… unpredictable.

The creatures started screaming to each other some noises Izaya could not understand. He didn't know if they were just above a level of a dog's barking or an actually eloquent speech. Then they dispersed, knocking down the wooden doors and dragging out the terrified residents. A man managed to escape one and he started running in frenzy away from them. Then one of the creatures barked something at another. That other picked up the weird black stick it was holding and pointed at the fleeing man. A moment later, the same noise as before was heard and the head of the man exploded just like the one of the man's before Izaya had.

Then it dawned on Izaya; those sticks were responsible for the massacre before. So, maybe, if he managed to avoid them, he would manage to escape with his life. The point was to not let a single green creature see him. It was an unlikely bet but it was better than nothing, at least now he could tell the direction of what seemed like the God's fury before. He just needed to hide until they left. Hide? Or get out of the village? How far had they gone? How did they come here in the first place? Where could they possibly be now? There was no way of knowing.

Anyway, it was dangerous to sit just right there. He turned swiftly in order to leave … and bumped right onto something else. In his terror, he had turned to leave very abruptly so the force of the collision threw him backwards and he landed on his backside. Before he could even come around from the impact, the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the end of a black stick, pointed straight to his face. He froze from the shock and he could only move his eyes, from down the green legs, up to the big eyes of the fly. He didn't even have the courage to think sarcastically what a wonderful day today was.

Those few moments when he realized he was probably going to die, he suddenly thought about his sisters and that maybe he liked them a bit after all. Together with them, he thought about the only human he was ever able to call a friend, Kishitani Shinra, a quack with unusually high levels of successful healing cases. Shinra was shunned from their home town and left because he had married a woman who was an outcast due to her strange physical characteristics, like the color of her hair and eyes. Izaya vaguely wondered what might have become of him…

Two other green creatures came from behind. Izaya heard them exchanging sounds with the one holding the stick up to his face, then he heard them laughing. He concluded that they must have been speaking, just in a different code. His curiosity momentarily overcame his terror, but that moment quickly passed because he realized that this laughter was a very ominous sign of what was about to happen to him.

His fears came true when the last two creatures from behind seized him from the arms and made him stand up, holding him so strongly that his escape was impossible. The one in front of him then lowered the black stick and guided it towards the ends of Izaya's yukata, at his ankles. Izaya looked at it perplexed until the creature delved it between his legs, inside the clothing, and then slowly pulled it up, revealing from the shanks and up more and more of his skin.

Izaya's first reaction would be to kick it off and he barely restrained the impulse, because he knew that this accursed thing was point right in his genitals from that angle. The laughter grew louder and he threw his head back and clenched his eyes shut in desperation, as they started to reveal his thighs. He knew what was going to happen to him, it seemed very much like what a monster would do. But then he realized that they didn't seem to have any genitals. He slightly opened his eyes to examine them better, something felt off. A very bad premonition came over him, as he was trying to discern the true nature of those creatures. He had never seen anything like that before, so he might have been mistaken, but as he analyzed their forms, his hunch only continued to grow stronger.

Suddenly, a rough hand shot up and grabbed him from the face, the fingers digging inside his cheeks. One of the creatures that were holding him had grabbed him and brought his face near those hideous oversized eyes. Izaya could only breathe heavily and stare back. Perhaps his hunch was indeed mistaken…

And then the stick was removed from near his person. His yukata fell down and covered his legs again, before other important parts of his body would be revealed, but before he could rejoice also, his hands were roughly shoved behind his back, and tightly tied so that he couldn't even flinch. Then, those two creatures grabbed him from the arms again and this time they started dragging him towards the other end of the alley. What Izaya came across as soon as they stepped into the other main street, was of course corpses and blood everywhere, but now, in the middle of the road, what was shining at the centre of the massacre were carriages. Their cargo was nothing other than people, locked inside huge, metallic cages. So, this was where all the people they were dragging from the houses were going? Izaya bitterly remember the cages of his city's Red Light District, with all the beautiful prostitutes smiling and calling the men for some hours to play. Izaya thought of those existences as pitiful, though occasionally, extremely beautiful women did exist in that industry. Geishas were pieces of art and truly worthy of a man's respect, but those poor souls behind the cages… It wasn't only then that it occurred to Izaya that their smiles were being faked, but he wished as bitterly that he didn't have to join them, as he was violently pushed inside a cage himself.

He almost fell on a woman and he had to drop on his knees to prevent that. Then, lifting his head up and looking around him, he saw that he was on the same cage with a woman in her thirties with big breasts – she must have been a wife and a mother, someone could only guess what had happened to her family – a couple of young girls in the age around sixteen to twenty and one young boy around that age as well. Everybody had wide, glued to the ground eyes, like the fear had already consumed their soul and left them completely empty. Then again, Izaya wasn't in the mood for a chat either.

As soon as he was shoved in, the carriage started to move. Izaya turned around and looked at the demonic landscape they were leaving behind. He was grateful for his life but he knew very well that unless he escaped, said life wouldn't last long. Either way, he stared at the creatures and examined them as thoroughly as he could. He didn't know what he was hoping to see… Until a corpse moved.

Obviously he was someone who had pretended that he died, waiting for the right chance. For Izaya he did something completely stupid, he could have waited until they were gone and then he would have escaped with his life. Idiots, the world was surrounded by idiots. Instead of fleeing, the man grabbed the first wooden stick he found from the broken door of a nearby house, and he swiftly brought it on the behind of the head of the first creature that passed him by, screaming in a blind fury.

Then Izaya saw it. That head with the big fly's eyes fell down unceremoniously. But it wasn't cut off, it just fell off. And when it did, it revealed what it was hiding.

Izaya had never again seen hair of that color. He felt his breath catching up his throat and he didn't realize that he was breathing until then. It was so bright it blinded him, like the coins he used to be paid with for his services. He didn't know golden hair could exist, but here it was, right in front of him. And then that person turned around and revealed a face with a sardonic smile plastered on it, as the blood from the previous hit was running from his hair down to his forehead and then cheeks. Izaya had seen that smile before. It was the expression a beast was taking when it was bearing its teeth, ready to lash out at its enemy.

"I should tell you," Shizuo growled as he was nearing the man that attacked him, who was left as dumbfounded as it was humanly possible, thusly he couldn't move a muscle. "that you SHOULDN'T HAVE FUCKING PISSED ME OFF YOU FUCKING BASTARD!" And with that bark, he punched that man so hard that he literally flew in the air for almost twenty meters and then he landed on his head with a sickening crack.

They were humans… and yet, they were not?


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Shizuo Heiwajima was a man who hated violence. For as long as he could remember himself, he was always repulsed and saddened at the mere idea of forcefulness of all forms. It wasn't like he despised conflict in general, after all that would be an absurd thought. What he disliked was when any form of violence had to take place in order to resolve that conflict. Inflicting pain at someone because you wanted to have something of his, because he took something of yours, simply because he did something that annoyed you or because you just hated his guts so much… Shizuo would have been happy and perfectly content if such things would just stop happening and the world would finally gain peace.

Those were the kind of thoughts he had as he crushed a half-smoked cigarette of his with his foot, next to a couple of unrecognizable corpses. He had spat it out before he could finish it because he was so damn annoyed right then. The hit at the back of his head that bastard before had given him did not hurt, but it was itching him like mad, all due to the blood that was making his hair stick on his head and creating a mess. He needed some water to wash it off…

"Hey, Shizuo!" He heard a familiar voice calling him and he turned his head around. "Did everything go as planned?" A man who was trying too hard to crack a smile and who Shizuo knew quite well came up near him and started walking next to him.

"Hah!" Shizuo let out, angry and exasperated. "And just what wasn't supposed to go as planned? We'd have more difficulty raiding a barn full of pigs with mattocks than what happened here today." They passed by the dead body of a small child and Shizuo gritted his teeth. No matter how many times he would see such battlefields it wasn't something he could just get used to.

"And which one of those pigs managed to injure the great Heiwajima Shizuo?" The other man asked playfully.

"What the fuck did you want, Kadota?"

"Nothing much, I'm just going to meet with Togusa and Yumasaki. I left them to do all the work by their own… I must go help them." He sounded dissatisfied and somewhat disappointed. It was always like this with Kadota. Since he was assigned at the supporting troops, he and his little group, among others, had assumed the task of taking care of whatever was left off of the mess. Usually they were gathering food and whatever else might have seemed useful, but now, since they were in a place nobody had set foot before, they had orders to gather just about everything they could find.

Shizuo knew that Kadota's disappointment wasn't because he was able to fight, he never did if he could avoid it; it was because he couldn't save anyone this time like he used to do before. Every time they had to attack civilians, after the attack was over, Kadota would always find a way to rescue some of the people left who were hiding. Shizuo never helped him at his activity but he never hindered or reported him. Their commander, Tanaka Tom, was always lenient at these kind of issues as well, but this time, since it was the first time they were attacking this place, the element of surprise worked in their favor and specific orders had been given from above not to let anyone escape. Although, for as far as they could see, the habitants were quite behind them in terms of technological advancement and the resistance would only amount to swords, bats, bows and arrows. Even so, as one sided as this fight was, their orders to eliminate any possible chances of loss were absolute.

"I see…" Shizuo took out another cigarette and put it in his mouth. "I was thinking of meeting up with Commander Tom, so I need to go back at the camp. Have they completed it yet?"

"Yes, it's almost over, that's where I'm coming from… But…" His face clouded up. "I doubt that taking care of setting up tents is what it's in the minds of most of them right now…" It was clear that he was starting to get bitter, as he clenched his fists. "I set up tents and cut down trees and gathered provisions so that murderers and rapists and all the bastards of society would eat and drink and fuck and kill in them and-"

"Kadota." Shizuo cut him off. He didn't say anything more but he didn't need to.

Kadota stopped and looked at him, and then he let out a small sincere smile. "Sorry. I'm supposed to have gotten used to it by now. You're right, we're in the army, we can't do much about what's happening around us, can we." He said so, but it was still obvious that he didn't believe so.

Shizuo just looked away. "Did they take many carriages this time?"

"Yes, and probably, almost no one will remain alive at the end of the night. It was only the first village. There'll be more in the future, so I doubt that they'll keep anyone to play with for a longer time just from the start."

"Yeah… you're right. That's probably what will happen." Shizuo concluded as well. "Well, see you later. I need to get back." He parted with Kadota with those words and a short waving, as he headed towards some of the carriages that were left, the ones without cages on. Usually they were using military SUV's but this time, they brought horses and carriages in a try to eliminate the noise for a sneak attack. Shizuo didn't particularly disliked horses, but they were a hell of a trouble to have upon the ship. They fucking smelled, and that fucking irritated him.

He hoped on the first carriage he saw. Not being able to ride a horse irritated him as well. "Are we leaving just yet?" He asked the one who was in charge.

"Yes, yes, don't worry Mr. Heiwajima!" The other man informed him at once. It was just crazy to piss Shizuo off and everybody had learned that by now, in the good or the hard way. The last time someone pissed Shizuo off before they stepped on land, they were searching for him in a radius of miles around the ship and they rescued him just in time, otherwise he would have become a nice snack for sharks. "I just got a bit late, I must confess, but I had trouble at the other carriage I was driving… I don't know what happened, a horse just started to kick all around like something spooked it! I was only carrying some… you know… in the cages…"

"I don't fucking care!" Shizuo barked at him. "Get going!" He ordered, and in almost thirty minutes they had already arrived.

Shizuo was lucky because he didn't have to search to find who he was looking for. As soon as he got off the carriage, a man with curly, long hair and glasses was coming over to him. "Shizuo! Where have you been, I have been looking all over for you! …what happened?" Tanaka Tom asked worried when he saw Shizuo's hair dyed in red.

"It's nothing, Commander Tom." Shizuo shrugged it off. "Do you have some water?" His commander nodded and gave him a calabash. Shizuo took a piece of clothe out of his pocket, which he was holding for situations like this, wetted it and wiped the blood off of his face and hair. He was used to such practices.

"I guess that there wasn't as big of a resistance as we expected?" Tom asked Shizuo, as they started walking down at the camp. It was clear that there were lot that needed to be done, especially at the outer perimeter, but still, it was an impressive task to put it together so quickly, considering that they had arrived only half a day before.

"What resistance." Shizuo didn't even put an exclamatory mark at his tone. "That was pure slaughter. There's just no way they can hold against our guns, especially if they have no clue of our existence. I didn't even participate in that fiasco, but still got my guard down and someone swung a stick on my head… that angered me."

"I can imagine." Tom smiled compliantly and then his expression turned even more serious. "I know Shizuo. There have been a couple of people that took the trouble to inform me."

"Only a couple, huh." Shizuo wondered out loud. Almost all of the people that had taken part at the attack must have had already returned long by then.

"Only a couple." Tom repeated after him. "Never mind, now the beginning has been finally made here. It took this long but it happened. Now I just have to report it and wait for further orders. We'll be keeping in the same pace until we receive them."

"The orders of the military higher-ups are and always will be absolute, I take it? We're in the army, so there's nothing we can do about it?" He remembered Kadota's words.

Tom stopped and looked at him. "Does this look like an army to you, Shizuo?"

"No." It was the blonde's immediate and blunt response.

"What does it look like to you then?"

"It doesn't matter what it looks like to me, it's about what it really is." Shizuo started walking again and Tom kept at his pace. "And the one and only truth is that this here is a bunch of murderers, rapists, thieves, and all of the dregs that our society couldn't fit behind bars, so instead of that, they decided to give them weapons and told them to go attack someone else, because there was no one more of a complete bastard and disposable at the same time. That's what this is, that's what we are. And we know it very well." Shizuo lit up another cigarette as he remembered the day he was put in front of the jury and given two choices: Death penalty or war duty. The charges were only on assault and normally it wasn't something that would get him a death sentence, but due to previous incidents, his inhuman physical strength was out in the open, and combined with his incredibly bad temper, it was just impossible for him to continue living as a normal human. Shizuo knew it very well since the age of twelve so he had already prepared himself when he had to make the choice at sixteen, if that was even considered as a choice.

Since then, he had been assigned in this battalion, given outrageous missions every single time. As he said before, people like him, whom society didn't favor, were used mainly for the dangerous dirty work. It had been almost nine years since then. Tom was a new but had proven himself to be a wise commander as well, in a couple of missions before this last one, the most extraordinary of all. They had been sailing around the winds for almost two years, waiting to discover and conquer what might lie beyond, stepping on land only occasionally to replenish their provisions in nearby small, uninhabited islands.

"That's right, that's what this is and what I'm supposed to be leading." Tom had made his point. "Most of them were prisoners for heavy felonies, and on top of that, we've been sailing for years. If I don't let them let off some steam now, it'll be all over for all of us. You might not want to continue any further." He warned Shizuo, but Shizuo knew what was happening in the center of the camp probably better than him. They could now clearly hear the screams, most of them belonging to women, and the almost satanic laughter of their tormentors. He knew just where the carriages with the cages had gone.

"My tent must be at the other side and it's a big circle. Let's go in a bit further and we'll take the detour when the things get too ugly if you want, Commander Tom."

"It doesn't anger you, Shizuo?" Tom questioned him once again.

"It does, but now I can take it. Because I know that this is what war is. And you as the commander, more than anyone, owe to know what happens here even of you have no other choice but not to try to stop it." Someone would think that Shizuo was talking out of line, but that was the way he was. He didn't know if it was true that the commander favored him, or he was just trying to secure Shizuo as his ally and not his enemy. Either way, Shizuo had been saved many times by him and he felt indebted towards him, so he thought that he should say what needed to be said.

"You are right. You are, but… it's such an unsavory sight."

"Every sight of war is unsavory." Shizuo replied.

"Heh… I guess you're right in that one too." Tom shrugged.

They both knew that what was happening at the center of the camp was an orgy sent straight from hell. Shizuo had seen many times soldiers taking women civilians like they were nothing more than animals. At first, he was enraged, and he narrowly escaped being charged with treason when he tried to kill his fellow soldiers who were abusing girls. But as he roamed from battlefield to battlefield, he saw that no matter from which side they were on, these atrocities happened; he then learned to accept it as another face of the war. It disgusted him to the core of his soul and reminded him of what a rotten human being he was more than when he was killing in battle or executing war prisoners. But he had vowed, for this exact reason, to never look away.

As they strolled further in, they saw soldiers dragging women from their hair and whatever was left of their clothes and throwing them inside their tents. There were some who weren't patient enough so they had dropped them right on the ground and raping them right there. Shizuo's and Tom's faces had already been contorted with disgust but they pushed their way further in. They saw a couple of others with boys. When Shizuo had decided he had seen enough, angry voices were heard just a couple of feet to their left.

They looked briefly at each other and then they headed towards that direction. As they walked, they heard the voices more clearly.

"Fucking bitch! She fucking killed herself, where did that cunt get the fucking knife, can you tell me?"

"How the fuck am I supposed to know? Aw, man, and she was the only one with such huge knockers! All of the women here look like men with cunts! Where are the boobs?"

"If it's going to be like that, we have men as well! Here, grab him-"

When Shizuo and Tom arrived at the scene, they encountered a corpse on the ground that it belonged to a big busted woman in her thirties. Her neck was skewered all the way through, and it look like she rested on a red pillow. Right next to her, four men were grabbing and clawing at a black haired man in his mid twenties. They had already torn away most of his robes' dark red fabric and only some rags were miserably clinging on him by then. He was putting up quite the fight, and he had multiple cuts and bruises all over him as a result, but four against one with his arms tied behind his back was rather futile. Shizuo vaguely noted the other man's gritted teeth as he was trying to hold back the screams. He shook his head in disappointment and he turned to leave as the other men were forcing him on his knees.

"Shizuo!" Suddenly, one of them yelled, and Shizuo turned swiftly at his direction. "Hey man, you have never taken a girl no matter where we go! What do you say, is this better suited to your tastes?" He winked at his accomplices, who just chuckled. "Here, we can share! You can go first!" They laughed, and they kicked the other man right at Shizuo's feet.

Many months later, when Shizuo would lie in the yard of a house he had never even dreamed of before, with nothing else to do, looking at the sky, he would often recall that first meeting, without being able to help himself but wonder what would have happened if he had simply ignored them, or even, if he had followed Tom's advice and had made that circle to reach his tent as he told him. But he hadn't done that. He had walked straight ahead. And when that man was thrown at his feet, he didn't ignore him, but he grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up, so that he could look him in the face.

The man let out a small yelp from the pain when Shizuo grabbed his hair, it must have been indeed painful for someone to feel his weight dragged up only by his scalp. Shizuo held him up at his feet, so that their faces would come closer and he could look at him. There wasn't a particular reason why he did it, he just felt like he wanted to see that guy's face.

He had a horizontal cut at the left side of his forehead, a bruised cheekbone and a slightly cut lip, but that was it. The ones that caught him were careful enough not to harm his face too badly and one could easily guess why. When he slowly opened his eyes and stared right into Shizuo's, he noticed their dark brown color. Shizuo's eyes then briefly traveled up and down and examined the battered, half-naked body in front of him. His robes had fallen off his shoulders, hanging miserably from his arms, leaving his torso wide open. The lower part was also torn in shreds, leaving one of his legs naked as well. Some rags were still covering his other leg and his privates, but it was obvious that he wasn't wearing anything else underneath.

Obviously, this was a sorry state for someone to be in, but when Shizuo locked eyes with him again, he realized that he was unable to feel much pity for him. Behind the well disguised desperation, the anger and the bitterness, Shizuo could feel a deeper form of malice. Like he was holding something venomous. He grimaced and pushed him violently back by his chest, making stumble and fall down on his back. "I don't fucking like him!" He just spat, and then he turned to leave.

He hadn't done two steps when he heard a voice he hadn't heard before yelling: "SHIZUO!" He half turned at the call, only to feel something hitting the left side of his head with force.

Shizuo froze for some moments, trying to realize what exactly had hit him. He felt liquid running down at the side of his face, as his fresh wound from before had just reopened. He slowly turned and saw the dark haired man on the ground, but with his arms free, his right hand hanging down like he had just thrown something. His attackers were looming over him but they had frozen on their tracks. In the brink of madness, all Shizuo could see was the devilish smirk adorning the dark haired man's face, and all he could hear was his arrogant chuckling. "Yo, Shi-zu-o…" He repeated, leaning his pretty head back mockingly.

Shizuo just saw red at that moment. He didn't have any memories of being more angered at anyone and anything before, and he falsely believed at that time that he never would, either. "Get away from him." He snarled, as he pulled his sleeves back to his elbows. "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HIM HE'S MINE I'M GOING TO FUCKING KILL HIM KILL KILL KILL!" He roared, as he went and blindly grabbed and ripped off the ground a huge nearby rock that it had been too hard to be moved from the people making the camp before.

The other men fled as fast as their legs could carry them. The number one rule in their battalion was to never anger Heiwajima Shizuo. And now that someone had awakened the beast, a fuck wasn't worth it to come face to face with his wrath.

As for the dark haired man, he remained where he was, watching Shizuo coming towards him, holding the giant rock over his head, which he clearly intended to use to make him a pulp onto the ground. "Fucking insect I'm going to bash your head into the ground I swear I'm going to fucking kill you, kill you, kill you!" Shizuo was growling but the dark haired man didn't seem fazed at all. His smirk just turned into a sad smile when Shizuo came and loomed right above him, the shadow of the rock engulfing both of them. He was looking at Shizuo in the eye and even though it was clear that there was just no hope for him, there wasn't a single sign indicating that he had the intention of breaking the eye contact. Shizuo hesitated under his gaze for a second, and that was probably when Tom found the opportunity to speak.

"No Shizuo, don't! STOP IT!" He yelled, effectively stopping Shizuo on his tracks.

"HAH? WHY?" Shizuo protested, still enraged.

"Stop it I'm telling you I have a reason! That's an order!" His Commander used his most imposing tone of voice, and Shizuo reluctantly realized that he had to comply. "And for God's sake, put that mountain down!"

Shizuo growled in anger but he did as told. Then the dark haired man's expression changed from the triumphant one and it hardened once again, his eyes sharply coming and going from Shizuo to Tom and vice versa. "What do you want, commander." Shizuo could barely maintain his composure, as his eyes were spitting lightings towards the dark haired man's direction.

"Doesn't anything ring weird to you, Shizuo?" Tom's habit of asking Shizuo questions seemed to be on a roll that day.

"Weird? He was asking for it! He called my name and…"

"He called your name when he knows neither our language nor who you even are." Tom explained to him. "He saw them calling you earlier and he concluded that this was your name. In addition, he purposely tried to anger you, so that you'd kill him before they could gang rape him."

Shizuo thought about it for some moments. "Maybe, so?" Little shit had tried to take advantage of him, hadn't he?

"So he's smart, Shizuo. And if he's smart, he can learn our language! If he can learn our language, we will have an interpreter, and if we have an interpreter, we will be able to communicate with them. And if we'll be able to do that, then maybe we can minimize in the long term the civilian casualties, and such abominable things like what's going on right now will cease to exist! And even without such a long term purpose, we absolutely need an interpreter for strategic reasons."

Tom's train of thought seemed to have some logic but nevertheless, something still bugged Shizuo. "I wouldn't trust him." He finally concluded, still glaring daggers at the object of his antipathy.

"We can't afford to wait for the next one." Tom shook his head. "So, from now on, do a good job taking care of him and teaching him the basics." He patted Shizuo on the shoulder and then turned to leave.

"Yes Si- WHAT!" Shizuo let out, dumbfounded. "No way, no way! I can't do that! I'll kill him at the spot! Plus, I don't want to!"

"There's nobody else I can entrust him to." Tom said, with his back still turned on Shizuo. "Nobody else can protect him from those who'll want to rape and kill him. You can do anything else you'd like, but if you'd refrain from killing him, that would be enough." Then Tom turned and looked at Shizuo. "Shizuo, this is the first personal mission I'm assigning you to do. Please, don't disappoint me." And then he left, leaving Shizuo with his mouth hanging open in a silent disbelieving pose.

From his part, Izaya could only watch, glued at his fallen on the ground position, as the was-he-a-human-was-he-not being with golden hair let out an exasperated growl and punched the rock he had grabbed earlier, breaking it to a million pieces. What the future had in store for him, or if such a thing still existed for him at this point, without being able to understand a thing of what was said right then, he had absolutely no way of knowing.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

The fact that the merciless monsters that had appeared and violently destroyed everything in Izaya's world, turned out to be fellow humans with masks and green clothes, did not surprise him in the least. As he was exclaiming almost every day, Izaya loved humans, he was fascinated by them, and that meant that he was spending his life studying them, viewing them, maybe experimenting on them… occasionally… okay, maybe less rarely… maybe quite often. And if there was only one thing that he was taught by that, was that a more murderous and sadistic kind of species other than them, did not exist in this world. Why would it surprise him if the same principle also applied to the world beyond the winds?

His interest was reaching its peak, but the innate fear wouldn't let it grow stronger. He had concluded that it would have been better if he escaped as soon as possible, but all the new rules that suddenly applied all around him wouldn't let him make a quick and safe decision. He did try to spook the horse of his carriage but that sadly failed. His curiosity might have been ultimately what got him, because he refrained from taking further action, until they were already in the middle of the camp. He had wanted to see more of those weird humans. He had assumed that since they got them on the cages, they needed them for some reason, so they would be safe for a while.

That was another mistake of his part. What was awaiting the prisoners was just the continuation of the previous carnage. He saw soldiers grabbing women, hitting them, ripping their clothes off, immobilizing them, and viciously taking them like dogs. Many of them, when they were reaching climax, they were strangling the poor woman they were abusing. Izaya also saw some cutting off necks, or plunging knives in the tender flesh of the tormented women, cutting open bellies, chests, one even dug up a heart.

It didn't take long for the smell of blood to fill the air. Izaya had never before felt so bad the need to pray, but he stopped himself on time. He was hiding a kunai in his sleeves, as always, because of his job, and okay, maybe his character, so he carefully cut the ropes that were binding his arms, not completely, but enough to tear them up easily. Then he had contemplated the pros and cons of holding onto it. The rest of the intruders clearly weren't as powerful as that one with the golden hair – although he had seen more with such hair since then, he couldn't forget that one – Izaya could tell by the way they were struggling to handle the women. But they still outnumbered him by far, and the possibilities of running away and escaping them were eliminated by both the fact that they were on the middle of a very huge military camp, and from the existence of the black sticks. Plus, he never knew what they were going to do to him if they found a knife on his person. So he just decided he'd lay low until he could grab one black stick for himself and somehow win his way out. He just had to wait for the right opportunity.

Then, there was that issue with the knife. He could have just thrown it out of the cage but… that wouldn't have been any fun. Instead, it would have been fun to see… how someone else would react. And so, he discreetly threw it near the older woman in his cage.

Her reaction was the outmost predictable. She didn't even try to take some of her attackers with her. As soon as they grabbed her from the cage and threw her on the ground, she killed herself without the slightest hesitation. But Izaya didn't have the time to get bored, as he was dragged out of the cage in her place.

He had pictured his death in his head a lot of times, thinking of how he wanted to die. He had never reached a definite conclusion, but one thing was for sure. Only one, as he felt the clothes getting ripped away from him, and the rough hands violating his skin. Not like this. Not like an animal, not like this. He wasn't the perfect human being, far from that; he knew it, but such an ugly way of dying… No, he wouldn't. He was above this. He wouldn't.

And then, he heard that word. "Shizuo!" they had said. And then he saw him. Hovering over him, the man with that beastly power.

Izaya had always had high levels of pride. He loved humans but he also believed that as individuals, most of them were definitely more stupid, more gullible, and more driven by their selfish desires than him, and consequently, not of his level. The difference of the height they were standing on was obvious. Izaya was smarter, always prepared, always away from the rest of them, untouchable. He was the one in control.

Getting thrown at the feet of this man was enough to shatter those illusions. He could feel the barriers that were protecting him breaking, and the little confidence he still had left flew right away from him. The thought of being taken by someone who possessed the kind of strength he saw before scared the wits out of him and left him shaking like a leaf. Not that being gang banged was a better option, but the desperation and humiliation were completely different from the thought of pure terror. This man would break him apart. He could feel it, he could sense it, he could even smell it, as he was being lifted up like a ragged doll. He couldn't stop himself from fantasizing the way he would violently be tormented and killed and there was nothing he could do to stop it, just because their levels were so different… only that this time, he was at the lower one. And the only other thing he could think of was just how much he hated this man, as he opened his eyes to meet the other's ones.

And then he faced something else he had never faced before with such intensity: Rejection. 'Shizuo' had said something, and Izaya could pretty much guess what it was, as he was thrown back at his previous capturers. 'Shizuo' had refused to take him. And now…

Izaya always thought that the people who commit suicide were all idiots. Seriously, what reason is there to end your own life? He was unable to understand it. If it was him, he would always choose the one way that would allow him to live if only a second longer. After all, he didn't have anything that precious that he would be willing to die for. Until then.

It seems like his pride was indeed weighing more than his life at that point. If Shizuo refused to take him, then there was no reason that he was willing to allow to those bastards to pick up the leftovers. Since there was no escape, it would have been better to die instantly rather than becoming their fuck toy. And since that option had just become available, with no hesitation, he threw that rock.

Even though he pronounced Shizuo's name only twice, he was keen on repeating it inwardly like a mantra. He couldn't help but wonder if that beastly man, whose anger and strength might have been unparalleled in the entire world, even in the one beyond the winds, knew what kind of meaning his name held in Izaya's language. He probably didn't. It was such an irony either way.

When that other man stopped Shizuo, Izaya perhaps felt a bit relieved, but he tensed up immediately as he didn't have a clue for the reason. They said something, something that Izaya couldn't understand. And then suddenly, he found himself alone with Shizuo.

After breaking that rock in his rage, Shizuo huffed and then turned reluctantly and came near Izaya again. "_Get up!" _He ordered him as he made a motion upwards with his hand. Izaya of course could not understand the content of the order, and though he could pretty much guess what it was, his legs wouldn't obey him, so he just kept staring at Shizuo in confusion. Shizuo let out an impatient sound, like clucking, and he quickly grabbed Izaya's right arm and lifted him up in a split second, like he weighted nearly as much as a piece of paper. Then he forced him to walk alongside him, as he was going even deeper inside the camp.

Izaya was grateful he hadn't been grabbed by the hair again, but the fingers digging into his arm were beginning to hurt almost as much. He desperately tried to pry them off, without of course any possibility of success. As he was struggling, Shizuo paid next to none attention to him, like his existence didn't mean anything more than an ant's. But when they passed near a dozen of soldiers butchering lots of their newly acquired playthings, Izaya stopped fighting and instinctively glued himself on Shizuo's side, clutching at the hand locked around his arm for dear life. Shizuo spared a glance at him but nothing more, and anyway Izaya never saw it, because he couldn't take his eyes off those atrocities unfolding in front of him, thinking of how easily he could become a victim too, if Shizuo so decided.

When they left that gruesome scene behind them, Izaya relaxed a tiny bit and removed himself from Shizuo's side. He still felt far from safe though, as he reminded himself that lots of them were just picking the piece of meat they preferred to party with it privately, in their tents. He bitterly wondered if he should have held onto his knife and taken his own life just like the woman had done before. But he quickly dismissed the thought. He disliked that possibility equally to his current situation. After all, he would have preferred to cut Shizuo's throat off and then run away from that hell. But of course that thought right then was for laughs.

It didn't take very long for them to reach the tent Shizuo had in mind. He threw Izaya in with force, and he landed painfully on his knees on a very light mattress, which resembled the futons his people were using to sleep on. Izaya let out a small pained cry, but he froze for some moments when he turned around and saw Shizuo stepping inside as well. Although the tent was quite big, Shizuo was so tall that he had to lean down to get in.

Realizing what would probably happen next, Izaya quickly turned around and scraped backwards, in an attempt to get away from the other man who looked so overwhelming right then. His chest had already started to ache from the constant exposure in danger and he suddenly felt very tired, knowing that this must have been the point where he started to give up. It didn't fit his character though, so he made one last attempt: "_No, Shizuo, stop!" _He said at that different code, while raising his hand, what he had heard from that curly haired man when Shizuo was about to kill him before. He just gambled that they meant what he thought they meant. And even if they did…

"_Why?" _Shizuo just asked him. Izaya knew that he was asking him for the reason, and he also knew that they both were aware that there was no way Izaya could give it. Shizuo kneeled beside him and Izaya tried to back away further, as much as he was allowed to in there. He desperately wanted to turn and claw at the fabric of the tent so that he could shoot himself out of it, but he was certain that if he as much as attempted it, Shizuo would grab him on the spot.

"_No… stop!" _He repeated, still keeping his hand raised up, trying to keep some non-existent distance between the two of them. _"Stop…no!" _He said for the last time, when Shizuo finally closed the gap and grabbed Izaya from the neck, throwing him backwards and pinning him down on the light mattress, essentially on the ground with a couple of sheets in between.

That was the point when Izaya understood that there was nothing he could do against the man above him as he was. He stopped fighting, both physically and mentally, and he concluded that he would just wait for him to do what he wanted with him and hope that he would still be alive by the time he would be finished. What a great way to go for the equally great Orihara Izaya… what would start happening in mere moments would definitely please many people who knew him if they ever found out, he bitterly thought. The wish of the man from this morning was about to come true, he could feel his spirit rejoice from the underworld.

Then Shizuo said something. Izaya couldn't understand it but he focused his attention on him. Then slowly, Shizuo released his neck and backed away. That stunned the other man, who lifted himself up a bit, trying to observe Shizuo a bit more. He saw him searching through a bag and he pulled out a white box with a red sign on it, and then a gray piece of clothing Izaya had never seen before. Then he turned towards Izaya once again, and said something else.

"I… I can't understand you." Izaya told him in his own language, shaking his head lightly left and right, as he was getting his upper body up, in a sitting position.

Shizuo probably understood it, because he sighed, exasperated, and then grabbed Izaya's ankle. "_Leg!" _He told him. Izaya was sure that he was ordering him to open them, but instead, he slid the piece of clothing he was holding through his right leg, and then through his left. Then he dragged it all up until Izaya's waist, covering effectively his privates, and he ripped away whatever was left of Izaya's yukata, it wasn't of much use anyway.

Since Shizuo had just covered him, Izaya concluded that he wouldn't violate him, at least for the time being. But he was still so petrified that he would hardly allow himself to believe it. He kept looking at the piece of clothe covering him from the waist to the middle of his thighs, as Shizuo kept removing the remains of his robes. It was covering him, but still kept his legs separately…

When Shizuo was done with that first task, he opened the white box and it was full with objects Izaya had never seen before. His curiosity helped him overcome his fear and he leaned in, trying to take a better look, as Shizuo was searching through it. Sensing him, the other man snapped his head up and suddenly their noses were almost touching, that's how close their faces had come. For some moments, none of the two dared to move, as they simply stared inside each other's eyes, magnetized by them. Then Izaya slowly backed away, because he knew, that if he kept staring, he would quickly get over the first shock and start trying to analyze the man in front of him. That would make him show his emotions, and that, on its turn, would allow Shizuo to notice them, like he had noticed them before, when he grabbed him by the hair. Izaya was fond of reading other people but he wasn't fond of being read, and he had the feeling that Shizuo would be able to. And that wouldn't be good for him, because if Shizuo saw just how much Izaya hated him, he would lose his temper again, and consequently, Izaya would lose his life. He could already see how much Shizuo disliked him so he wasn't going to take any more chances. So he just backed away and averted his eyes.

At first, Shizuo didn't say anything, and he resumed searching that box. First he pulled out another small piece of cloth, white, and then he grabbed a weird bottle containing a transparent liquid, with which he wetted the cloth. Izaya smelled the alcohol, though it was five times as intense as he was used to, and he concluded that it must have been a kind of beverage… Until Shizuo brought it up and placed it upon the cut on his forehead.

It burned him, and Izaya hissed at the touch and clenched his eyes shut, but he didn't back away because he knew that alcohol would be good for his wounds. Then, slowly opening his eyes, he tried to come to terms with the fact that not only Shizuo was not abusing him, but he was treating his injuries as well. The thought that he wanted to doll him up first as much as possible did cross Izaya's mind, but looking at Shizuo's face once again, the thought passed by as quickly as it came. It had mellowed up quite a bit, and though the feeling of mutual disliking still hung in the air, Shizuo had temporarily put it on the side.

When he was done with the cloth he stuck something on Izaya's forehead, upon the cut, something that Izaya had no clue what it was but he was determined to examine later. He did try to peel it off but Shizuo grabbed his hand, stopping him. "_No!_" He said.

_Why, _Izaya wanted to ask, but he refrained from it, as it would serve no other purpose but angering the other man. Shizuo continued his treatment to the rest of Izaya's body, even he himself hadn't realized how badly was hurt or how intense the pain was. But now, as the shock and the levels of adrenaline were fading away, it did hurt an awful lot. Both of his elbows were scratched pretty badly from being dragged on the ground, his knees were even worse, and blood was streaming down at his hands and legs. His fingers and toes were also cut in many places, and his whole body was covered in large bruises, which had already started to take a deep purple color.

Shizuo carefully cleaned the blood off, cleaned all the cuts with alcohol and tied with gauzes the deepest wounds, including the elbows and the knees. Then he fished out of the box another weird object, he opened it, and another transparent, but this time thick liquid, fell on his hands. Izaya looked at it perplexed, but he had no time to protest, when Shizuo started spreading it over Izaya's bruised skin of his chest. The hands that made a man fly twenty meters away and broke him instantly, the hands that were capable of holding a rock the size of a bear above their owner's head, were now capable of such a gentle touch. It was like Izaya was sitting on needles; that was how tense he was, as Shizuo continued treating him. Then he proceeded treating the bruises on Izaya's thighs and the dark haired man shivered, thinking that, had the circumstances be different, he might have even gotten an erection, not because of any sexual attraction but due to the thrill of the moment. It would have been truly exciting… if this man were to be his ally… if this beastly strength was something that Izaya could control then…

He shook his head lightly. Such thoughts were dangerous in his current situation and he couldn't allow himself to be swept away. That became clear when Shizuo started treating the final bruise, the one on Izaya's cheekbone. It only took some seconds but Izaya couldn't take his eyes off Shizuo's face, studying him, analyzing him, without being able to help himself like before. Like he couldn't get enough of watching him. The golden hair, the deep brown eyes, the straight nose, the strong chin. He was very weird on Izaya's eyes, but, as he bitterly had to admit, maybe a bit of handsome.

Shizuo, on the other hand, did not pay any attention to him more than necessary. He just finished his treatment and then he simply grabbed another piece of clothing from his other bag, were he had taken the gray one from. It was rather big and it had a very peculiar shape, Izaya noticed, but then again, everything in that new world was. "_Hand!" _He said then at Izaya. Seeing that Izaya wouldn't understand, he grabbed Izaya's hand and repeated: _"Hand." _ And then he passed Izaya's hand through one hole of the fabric. Then his other hand, then his head, and then he dragged it down so it was covering him until his waist.

Izaya found it weird, tight and restricting compared to his yukata, but it was another piece of clothing on his almost naked body so he was rather grateful for it. Now that he was almost fully dressed, he started feeling more comfortable and his body instinctively relaxed. Then he was again able to hear the screams from the hell outside. He had forgotten about that. He had forgotten about everything and everyone else in this world besides the man next to him. But now, the weight of the reality of the situation fell down on him heavier than a hundred swords. He was Shizuo's prisoner, and the only thing in his possession was his mind. Not even his body, and certainly not his life.

Then, Shizuo did something else as well. He grabbed a calabash that was near him, and took out of his pocket, two very small and round objects, one white and one light pink. _"Water." _He said, turning the calabash upside down and dropping a few droplets on the ground, making Izaya realize that it was actually water. Then he put one of the objects in his mouth, drank immediately some water and swallowed it along with it. He did the same with the other one. Then he took other two out of his pocket, and gave them to Izaya, along with the calabash.

Izaya definitely did not want to swallow something he had never seen before, but he had just witnessed Shizuo do it so it must have been safe. Plus, he didn't want to anger him. So, hesitantly, he took them and did as instructed. He drank quite a lot of water though. His mouth was dry and he hadn't realized how much he was thirsting.

Almost immediately he started feeling himself dazing off. He got scared. Shizuo seemed fine… but… were his internal organs much stronger than a normal person's like the rest of himself? It was absolutely possible. Unable to keep himself together, he fell back on the light mattress, his vision blurring more with every passing second. He finally succumbed and closed his eyes, drifting off, wishing with all of his heart that he would open them again. He didn't even have the time to curse Shizuo for this.

Shizuo saw Izaya drifting off to sleep, and he sighed. He had just given him the lightest painkillers and sleeping pills he had. If he hadn't done that, this man would have never slept, given the pain and the screams from outside. And he honestly didn't know what to do with him, had he been awake. Shizuo just wanted to postpone any kind of interaction, and furthermore, the man needed to get some sleep, after what he'd been through that day. He might have pissed Shizuo off big deal, but as used as he was to his battalion's brutality, a small part of him still felt sorry for that guy.

He slipped a pillow under the other man's head, and dragged some sheets over him, trying to make him more comfortable. Then he stayed a bit over him, watching his face. He knew how intensely this man was watching him and examining him before, so now it was only fair, Shizuo thought. Without the smirk, and the full of malice eyes, he was just a pretty face. Shizuo couldn't deny that he was pretty, and he wasn't the type to deny that for someone else either way, because he couldn't understand such kind of jealousy. Something still bugged him, and it must have been instinct, because he still couldn't stop comparing they guy with a snake, or an insect. Yes, an insect was better, he thought, as he carefully brushed away with his hand some black strands falling on the other's forehead. Insect or not, it was the first mission Tom had given him. At least, he wanted to carry it out till the end. Maybe it would make him fell like he'd have accomplished something, that he was actually useful for something besides killing and destroying and causing violence, which he so much despised.

It would have been a lie if he claimed that raping him hadn't crossed his mind when he slammed him down on the ground. Everyone else around him was always having fun, why should he not? The winners take it all. It was his right, which he had acquired when they conquered that village. And this guy was a man, it wasn't a defenseless woman. It would just be a battle of superiority. He had pissed him off. He could have blown some steam without killing him, and have some fun in the process. How long had it been since he'd been with a woman? He didn't even remember.

And then he imagined him struggling and crying and hurting underneath him and he got disgusted with himself. Doing something like that when the other didn't want it, didn't enjoy it as well… It was so pathetic, so low, so utterly detestable. The black haired guy had already gotten limp in his hands, and Shizuo knew very well what he was expecting. He didn't like it. Shizuo didn't like it at all. That was when he decided that his anger would have to wait for another day. "I'm not going to hurt you." He had said, as he let him go. The other of course didn't understand. When he grabbed him some boxers to wear and asked him to give him his leg he didn't understand him either. So he had just treated him and dressed him up with as few words as possible.

Shizuo stepped outside of the tent and sat down just in front of it, lighting up a cigarette and looking up at the sky, which had started to grow dark. The screams were hitting his ears painfully, though not as painfully as nine years ago. Those pills of course wouldn't work on him. Even if they would, Shizuo would not have taken them. He wasn't planning on sleeping that night anyway. He had to hear those screams and remind himself of who he was.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

When Izaya woke up, his whole body felt stiff and even though his eyes fluttered open, he closed them again quickly and turned over, clutching the sheets more tightly around him. He could constantly hear voices and noise around him, and his futon felt harder than ever. Where was Namie? He needed to ask her just what was that fuss all about…

And then in his mind, boomed the images of green creatures and black sticks and torn clothes. He shot himself up almost screaming, with eyes wide of terror and cold sweat running down his temples. He looked panicked around him and then, when he remembered Shizuo's existence, he froze.

He took some deep breaths, trying to calm himself down. He was inside a very weird tent, which barely had inside that makeshift bed he was lying on with the sheets on the ground, some strangely shaped bags, and a low and round barrel. What was leading to the outside world was a cut at the entrance of the tent, where one could see outside where the fabric was cut to create it. Izaya saw some smoke, and then the broad back and the blond hair. There was no way he could have restrained himself.

Shizuo heard the footsteps nearing behind him, so he turned only his head around, this way coming effectively face to face with the black haired man. "Good morning." He told him, as Izaya held the fabric of the tent's entrance with his left hand, standing right behind him but without making that one step to leave the tent's inside.

Shizuo could see Izaya watching him like a hawk, trying to see through him. That made him uncomfortable and irritated him, but it wasn't something he could complain about out loud. There are some things you just don't like in another person when you meet them. Shizuo had already declared his dislike so there was nothing more he could do at the moment, except for cursing the turn of events that brought him at the current position. And even if he did, the other man had no way to understand him.

He opened his mouth to at least say something, but another voice cut him short.

"Hey, Shizuo! Is the hell over already?" Kadota waved and approached Shizuo, followed by the rest of his party, Yumasaki and Togusa. He looked worn out and possibly a bit relieved. "We just saw them disposing of dead bodies at-" Then he spotted Izaya and froze at his tracks, his other two friends almost bumping at him.

"Damn it Kadota, that hu-" Togusa began to complain but Yumasaki poked him and showed him the man inside Shizuo's tent, making him shut up as his jaw almost touched the ground.

Izaya noticed that the reaction of the other men was directed towards him and he took a step behind, hiding further inside the tent, but still without letting the fabric of the entrance go. Shizuo noticed it as well, albeit a bit late.

"Wha- No, no, it's not what you think, no!" He hurried, pissed off again, as he stood up in a flash. "Don't you dare misunderstand it!"

"Then just what…" Kadota tried to ask for explanations. He was still dumbfounded about his recent discovery but he couldn't believe that Shizuo would do what many other bastards of their battalion did.

"Ah, for fuck's sake!" Shizuo messed his hair in his frustration. "Commander Tom just thought that this one was smart so he made me watch over him until he could learn our language and act as an interpreter. I'm not fucking him, for God's sake!"

"Ooh, is that right?" Yumasaki wondered out loud. "An interpreter! Have I read something like this before, I don't think so… But maybe Erika…"

"So, Kadota, can you get some clothes for him?" Shizuo asked Kadota as said man was approaching Izaya in his curiosity. "His were already torn and he can't go on wearing my underwear… Didn't you guys pick up everything from that village?"

"We did, we stayed there all night." Togusa informed him. "It was depressing, but it would have been more depressing to come back here."

Kadota stood in front of Izaya, expecting to find a trembling and scared animal, and not a composed and calculating man. His eyes were sharp and Kadota could tell that he was definitely more cunning than an average man. His form was still rigid though and it was obvious that he had put himself on defense. "Hi, I'm Kadota." He said, and extended his arm for a handshake.

Izaya just looked at it. The man in front of him seemed like a decent guy but he couldn't understand the meaning behind his words or his extended hand.

"Don't bother Kadota he can't understand you." Shizuo interrupted them.

"Eh… Shizuo…" Yumasaki raised his hand hesitantly. "I didn't think it was possible but you won't be the one to teach him, will you?"

"HUH? Of course I will be!" Shizuo glared at him. "Do you have any problems with that?"

"No! No, absolutely no, not at all!" Yumasaki denied like his life depended on it.

Kadota just resorted to a tilt of his head and a small smile for a greeting, and then he turned and joined his friends once again. "Don't worry Shizuo, I'll bring you the clothes by tonight. Also…" He glanced momentarily behind and saw that Izaya was still watching him. "Nah, forget it."

"Well then, I'll be depending on you." Shizuo nonchalantly commented, as the three of them said their goodbyes and left him alone with Izaya again. It might have been about time, He thought, as he headed towards the tent.

Izaya let go of the fabric he was holding and stepped behind, allowing Shizuo to step inside the tent as well. He was taller so his head was touching the top, plus it felt a bit constricting with two people inside. Izaya backed away slowly, but only a couple of steps, as much as the small place would allow him to. Every fiber of his being was screaming danger but he couldn't allow to himself to look weak or scared in front of the other man.

Shizuo noticed that he was being cautious, and he really couldn't blame him. But the conversation with Kadota had reminded him of something that he should have probably wondered sooner. "You…" He said, and pointed his finger at Izaya. "What's your name?"

Izaya fumed inwardly. There he went that guy again, asking him questions he had no way of answering. But of course he didn't show it and he just took the last word he thought he heard. "Name?" He repeated.

Shizuo sighed again, that exasperated sigh. Talking and trying to make anything akin to a conversation when the other person wasn't able to understand him at all, would be a tremendous trial for his patience. "Shizuo." He said, pointing at himself. Then he pointed at Izaya, waiting.

And of course, this time he was understood. "Izaya." Izaya said without mentioning his last name. Shizuo, if he had one, hadn't mentioned it as well.

"Izaya." Shizuo repeated. That was a weird name. All right, now they both knew each other's name. That was progress… Well no, the hell it was! "So, Izaya!" He started.

Izaya continued watching him, expecting what he would say.

"I don't like you!"

The full of disdain look Izaya gave him after that made Shizuo want to punch him to the next dimension and he would never be able to explain how he restrained himself. The 'I can't understand you, you dumbass, and you know it very well, so what the hell are you spouting' kind of look must have been the most irritating look he had experienced so far.

"Well, I bet you don't like me either…!" He growled through his teeth as a vein popped dangerously on his forehead. "Well it doesn't matter you little shit because you're going to do exactly as I tell you, and there won't be any 'I don't understand' excuses! You got me?" He said, this time pointing his hand warningly at Izaya.

Izaya ignored all of the rambling he couldn't understand, and he moved forward, taking in his own hands Shizuo's one. "Hand." He said, examining it, and then looking at Shizuo's stunned face.

"Y-Yeah…" Shizuo nodded. He understood that nothing could start if he didn't take into consideration the words Izaya already knew. Which were limited about to: no, stop, Shizuo, hand, leg.

"Yeah…" Izaya repeated.

"No… yes." Shizuo corrected him. Izaya looked at him perplexed. "No." Shizuo moved his head slightly left and right. "Yes." Then he moved it slowly up and down. "Understand?"

"Understand. Yes." Izaya nodded as well. "Leg." He said then, showing Shizuo's leg.

"Yes…" Shizuo raised his eyebrow. Then Izaya looked at him in the eye again and then he made some movements with his hands, bringing both of them forward and unfolding them, like urging him to continue.

Well, it might be a good idea. After all, it was better than nothing.

"Nose." He said, and he pinched Izaya's nose, watching him in amusement yelping and taking a step back, covering his nose, as he was taken by surprise. We wondered if he had used too much strength but Izaya just seemed a bit pissed off. "Ear." He continued and grabbed Izaya's right ear, grinning at the annoyed man.

"Stop!" Izaya protested and shook Shizuo's hand away, boiling from rage. He knew that he had to put up with this in order to learn some words and understand what they wanted to use him for, since they didn't kill him or abuse him right away. But still, there was a limit to how much his pride could take. He was almost this close to tell him not to touch him in his language, and though he stopped on time, because Shizuo wouldn't understand him but he wouldn't miss his tone either, he couldn't contain the malicious glare he shot at the other guy.

Of course, Shizuo noticed it and the light atmosphere changed at the spot. He grabbed Izaya from the front of his shirt and brought him right up to his face. "You bastard… You'd better fix that look of yours. You know, my patience isn't limitless!"

Izaya understood very well the concept of his words, as well as the fact that there was no way they could get along, if all it took to irritate this guy with the monstrous strength was a simple wrong way of eyeing him. He'd have to mask his intentions even better than usually. He thought that he was already a master at this but apparently it didn't work on Shizuo. And something was tugging at him, making him wonder if it ever would. It was also important the fact that despite his position, Izaya didn't want to mask anything for Shizuo. He despised him, he despised everything about this hellish camp and he wanted to make sure that Shizuo knew it very well.

"Understand." He said eventually, loosening the tension of his shoulders and lowering his head a bit, taking a composed expression. Then he carefully placed his hands on Shizuo's chest, pushing himself lightly backwards, away from the other man. 'Now let me go', he wanted to get across.

He wasn't even half surprised when he was tossed on the sheets once again. Shizuo quickly loomed over him and he instinctively guarded his face with both of his arms, expecting a destructive punch to come his way.

Though Shizuo had raised his arm, the punch never came. "Ah, alright, fine!" Shizuo finally shouted out and just sat next to Izaya, who as soon as he realized that he wasn't going to get beaten, he sat up as well. "You know, I really am going out of my way for a bastard like you. Normally, I would have just beaten you to the ground." He had his back turned at Izaya so he just kept going on about whatever came to his mind, without minding that the other couldn't understand him. "Though I guess… You saw and went through some pretty bad stuff since yesterday…" Shizuo's face softened a bit as he remembered. "Even though you do have the eyes of someone who has done bad stuff as well… I know, I can tell. I've seen many like you, and I don't think I'm mistaken. So, even if you don't try making me angry, I'll probably get anyways, but it's my job to keep you at least alive for a while so… Now what the fuck are you doing!" He barked out, realizing that Izaya was completely ignoring him and playing with the blond strands of his hair instead, without being at all shaken from the previous attack on his person.

"Kireina kami…" Shizuo heard him whisper and even if he couldn't understand, he deduced it had something to do with his hair. And he was right, since Izaya was indeed admiring the color of the other man's hair; that striking gold one he noticed even inside that ferocious nightmare. But it didn't feel soft at all through his fingers, instead it felt rough, and he noticed that the roots on the top of the other's head had a darker color. It was only a bit at the start of them, but he could tell, due to the small distance.

"It's hair." Shizuo just informed him. Then he held a few of his own strands with one hand and a few of Izaya's with the other. "Hair." He repeated. Izaya's felt very silky, just like yesterday.

Izaya had never before tried to seduce a guy. Even when he was always willing to play any trick in the book to get what he wanted, there were limits his pride was indicating him. He would never stoop as low as trying to charm his way with another guy. Then again, he had never before found himself in such a desperate situation that he would even need to consider it. Now the sudden thought was making his insides burn, his heart racing and his mouth dry, the need to conquer that man in front of him as tremendous as it was sudden. He was all alone, surrounded by people that brought the ultimate doom to his country, he didn't have a clue about what was going to happen to him, and even so, for a split second, all that became insignificant, just by being with another person.

But that second passed and Shizuo broke free from Izaya's intense gaze and removed his hand from his hair, like it was nothing for him. And it probably was. Izaya's heart sank as he deduced that the only reason he was being kept like this was because he would probably be fed to someone important as an untouched prostitute, and Shizuo was only there to guard him until that happened. He couldn't think of any other reason. If that was so, he needed to escape soon, but first he needed to make sure. After all, the need he had just felt was not the need to belong to Shizuo, Gods forbid. It was the need to make Shizuo belong to him.

So, when Shizuo tried to stand up, he grabbed him from the arm and held him down, making him look at him again. "Hair." He repeated. "Understand. Understand… dakara…" He still wouldn't let go of Shizuo's arm. "Motto… oshiete!"

Shizuo groaned and messed his hair once again, but he didn't get irritated this time. Izaya made it easy to understand him and that helped considerably. "Okay." He nodded. "Let's just start from the basics, alright? I. Am. Shizuo." He pointed at himself. Then at Izaya, waiting.

"I am Izaya." He responded quickly and impatiently. The most needed skill for manipulation was the eloquence of speech and his greatest weapon had turned out to be his most severe flaw. There was no time to lose.

"Okay." Shizuo nodded. "I am Shizuo. You are Izaya."

"I am Izaya. You are Shizuo." Izaya didn't miss a step and replied almost instantly.

Shizuo frowned. "Right…" That was almost too quick. "Now…" He grabbed a cup and held it. "Cup." He pointed at it. "Mine." He said, as he held it tightly. Then he gave it to Izaya. "Yours."

Izaya held it as well. "Cup… Mine? Mine." He understood that it meant that the object belonged to him. He gave it back to Shizuo as well. "Yours."

They passed many hours with Shizuo trying to explain parts of the body and what they did, gathering up the most common and easy words he could think of. Izaya would pick them up instantly and there was no need for him to repeat or explain again the same word. Even so, it was near impossible to make themselves able to converse with each other that quickly. After some time, Izaya tried something. "Shizuo…"

"What?"

"You… me…" In his need to explain Izaya was making too many movements with his hands and it even irritated himself, so he took a deep breath and tried to settle. "Give to men?"

"Eh? What do you mean?" Shizuo raised his eyebrow, but Izaya didn't have a chance to rephrase it, as Kadota's voice was heard from outside:

"Shizuo! I brought you the clothes you asked of me!"

Both of them shot up and quickly stepped outside the tent, with Shizuo murmuring how quick that was. Kadota was there, holding a black piece of fabric with gray patterns, which Izaya recognized as a yukata, much like the one he was wearing the day before. Kadota smiled a bit and held it towards Izaya. "Here, for you."

"Thank you." Izaya said and took it, bowing a bit to show his gratitude the way he knew.

Kadota, on the other hand, was astonished. "Eh? It was nothing…" He then turned at Shizuo. "Seriously? That soon?"

"That wasn't anything difficult and besides, my method is perfect." Shizuo bragged. "What? Did you have any doubts?"

"Ah, look at how much the time has passed!" Kadota checked his watch and Izaya immediately spotted that weird device. "Sorry Shizuo! Duty is calling!" He turned on his heels and left without a care in the world.

"Kadota, you bastard! You purposely did not answer just now, didn't you?" Shizuo was ready to start swearing more, but Izaya surprisingly cut him off.

"Kadota!" He called, and the other man turned and looked at him. Izaya gave him a small smile. "Hi, I am Izaya." He wanted to add something akin to 'pleased to meet you' but he had no words for it. Kadota was an interesting individual. Izaya would like to think that he was not a bad one but he was definitely more shady and suspicious than Shizuo who showed who he was as brightly as the sun. Kadota would have a reason to come and be a part of this battalion, as well. But there is no point in playing to win if you don't get to know your pieces.

"Hi Izaya." Kadota replied. "I'll see you around." He added and then simply walked away.

Shizuo and Izaya looked at each other. Then Izaya made the same movement that Kadota had done when he looked at his watch, tapping the top of his wrist. "What is?" He asked.

"Oh, come on!" Shizuo rolled his eyes and dragged Izaya inside the tent again. Right then, that was too difficult to explain. Additionally, he needed to get him dressed.

Black turned out to be a very fitting color for Izaya. This robe he was wearing also had a waistband of black and dark green color. Shizuo thought that he needed to teach him of the colors as well. He had let him keep the boxers underneath and he lent him his sandals, as he miserably realized that he had forgotten to ask Kadota for some shoes.

"It looks good on you." He said, averting his eyes.

"Heeeh…" Izaya smirked. "What, Shizuo?" He asked, even though he fully knew what the other man had meant. He wished so badly that he knew the words to tease him more, but maybe it was better for his well being that he didn't.

Shizuo placed his hands on his waist and looked Izaya in the eye. "It's good!" He openly declared. "Understand? God damn it!"

Izaya was almost left gaping; he would if he wasn't so used to maintaining a poker face. He was sure Shizuo would throw a fit and deny everything. Well, perhaps it was a bit early to read him after all. "Understand, understand."

"Well then, let's go! We've got to eat!"

Izaya was already growing tired of Shizuo grabbing and dragging him anywhere he wanted from his upper arm, he was sure that he had gotten some new bruises, but Shizuo didn't seem to drop the habit, as he grabbed him once again and guided him outside the tent.

Being able to observe the camp and given the opportunity to stroll through it truly thrilled Izaya. It was a new world, perhaps, no, definitely, more technologically advanced than his, with new objects, new ways of human behavior and an entire different set of boundaries. Izaya smiled bitterly as the scent of fresh blood hit his nostrils, the only thing that had remained to remind of him of what happened the day before, and that those humans were more like animals when it counted. Many sets of eyes had turned and gotten glued at them as they were passing by, but that was only natural after all. Izaya was busy watching them and whatever they had in their hands, like many variations of the black sticks, culinary, utensils… He was also too busy watching them and hearing them speak as well.

Shizuo let go of Izaya's arm after a while and he just simply walked close enough by his side, watching him from the corner of his eye. That guy was bad news and he could tell by the way he was looking and analyzing everything around him. Normally, most people would be too afraid to even move after what happened to them, but he hardly seemed affected. Instead, if there was a word for it, he seemed excited. Well, he wasn't normal. Neither was Shizuo, but… That guy hadn't done anything and he was still rubbing Shizuo the wrong way. And that thought didn't seem to leave his head.

As he was wondering what they would eat today, trying to change his mindset, he heard the voice he despised the most. "Heeeey, Heiwajima, DARLING!" The mocking tone hit his ears like the last brand new missile. "What's up with you? Finally decided to join our kind of men?"

"Shaaaaazeeeeesh…" Shizuo growled, slowly turning around to face the man behind him. Izaya turned as well, and his blood froze for a moment, because he recognized the guy standing behind them, accompanied with half a dozen of his kind. He was the one who was raping and murdering in the most brutal way all the young girls from the cages the night before. It was an intimidating man, not very tall but not short by any means, pretty buffed up, with black hair till his jaw line and black, short cut beard. Izaya kept his ground next to Shizuo though and he didn't step back to hide behind him.

"Oh, come on Shizuo, we're all in the same boat here aren't we? But you know… he's cute, but… a man? In his mid twenties, as well? Heck, Heiwajima, if you had wanted this kind of fuck, you could have gotten it on board! Now talk about some waste of time I mean!"

Shazesh was the kind of man Shizuo was deliberately avoiding because otherwise he would have long ago killed him and that would be a major inconvenience for Tom. Now that it had come to this though, he was almost happy to get the chance to send him to the next dimension and even further if that was possible. But before that, he needed to establish something.

"Waste of time, huh?" He said, as he took a couple of steps forward, cracking his knuckles and wearing his most sadistic grin. "You might be right, you know. He's still mine, though. You know what that means? Eeh? Shaaaaazeeesh?"

"Stop, stop, now, let's not get into a fight, you know?" The other guy put his hands up, in a stand of surrender, but he was still smirking. "Let's talk about this like adults, okay?"

"Adults? The fuck do you mean?" Shizuo spat out.

"You keep the ownership rights…" Shazesh shrugged. "And we will be just lending him from time to time! You know, just to see what's so great about him that he moved even your dick!"

Shizuo turned around like lightning, but one of Shazeshe's men had already sneaked up behind Izaya and had grabbed him by the neck and twisting his left arm behind his back, rendering him unable to move. Normally, Izaya would have evaded the small fry like it was nothing, but he was sure of how he was supposed to react, plus he was wondering if it would be a bad timing for him to beat one of them into the ground.

"Shazesh, he does smell good, you know!" The guy that caught Izaya said in a disgustingly nasal voice. Then, he turned and licked Izaya's cheek, making his face contort in utter revulsion. "I can't wait to jam it right into your sweet ass!" He said and thrust his hips, hitting with his waist Izaya's backside, and making him feel his erection.

Izaya was ready to teach him some really bitter lesson, and in no way ready to witness what he did. The transformation from a human to a beast, the moment what a person loses all logical thought and pure animal instincts take over, he thought that he saw it all the day before but the craziness caused by pure rage could not be compared with the craziness of lust. Maybe the results were the same but the power of the rage was so much fiercer, so much more undeniable, so much more purely absolute. It was even worse that yesterday. It was.

Shizuo had come right in front of them in a flash of light. The speed with which he punched the other man, straight in the face, making him let go of Izaya instantly, was unparalleled. But he didn't let him fly like the one yesterday. This time, the force nailed the man on the ground, and Shizuo jammed his foot right onto his stomach, pinning him down and making him cough up even more blood than he already was. His face had turned into a mash of broken bones, teeth were flying in every direction, his nose was destroyed beyond any repair and he was just sobbing there, unable to do anything else from the shock. And Shizuo didn't stop there.

"HE. IS. MINE!" He roared, now striking with his foot the other man's shin, making it break with a sickening crack. "DID YOU HEAR ME YOU MOTHERFUCKERS? HE'S MINE, MINE, MINE!" He continued roaring, breaking more bones with each 'mine'. "AND WHOEVER TOUCHES HIM, I'M GOING TO KILL YOU! I'LL KILL YOU, I'LL KILL YOU, I'LL KILL YOU!" And he mercilessly kept striking down, each time harder than the last.

"FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SOMEBODY STOP HIM!" A random voice was heard from around, and everything started moving again in a distinctive frenzy. Izaya watched like he was hypnotized Kadota and his friends, and even Shazesh, the only men brave enough, throwing themselves on Shizuo and trying to control him, as his victim quietly sobbed until he passed out from the pain. Judging from the state of his legs, even if he did survive the assault, he would never walk again.

Control him? Seduce him? Whom, this beast? Izaya still remained bewitched at Shizuo's sight, at that display of fury and strength, as even four men could not restrain him. Then he realized.

Shizuo was not a human. He could not be categorized as any of Izaya's beloved humans. He was a monster, more than anyone around there. He was a beast.

_HE'S MINE, MINE, MINE!_

As screams were being heard all around and probably most of them were to call for the Commander, Izaya couldn't contain his most wolfish grin ever, akin to baring one's fangs.

One that Shizuo never saw because he was too much lost in his wrath.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

"WHY THE HELL DID YOU SNAP?"

Tom had spent the past half an hour going up and down inside his tent, scolding Shizuo ceaselessly. Izaya noticed that his tent was much bigger than the rest of theirs, thing that probably meant that he was the most important person there. He didn't seem so, though, for he wasn't imposing or severe at all. The only amazing thing about him was that when he talked, Shizuo listened. Izaya hadn't forgotten how this person was actually the one who saved him, so he was definitely intrigued to observe him further. As time was passing, Tom was continuing the lecture and Shizuo was quietly listening to him, Izaya concluded that he might be the top in this camp, but he definitely was a very small part in the entire military structure.

When Tom stopped to catch his breath, Shizuo started quietly: "He was trying to hurt him…" He slowly pointed at Izaya.

"Yesterday you were about to throw a rock in the size of a building on him, did you forget that?" Tom turned and looked at him incredulously. "For God's sake Shizuo, I only asked of you to keep him alive! Don't do that at the expense of our own men!"

"Well if I didn't do that, they wouldn't get it…" Shizuo murmured and looked away. "It's not like he died, anyway…"

"He might not walk again, Shizuo! I'll have to send him back!" Tom replied without missing a bit. "You cost us a soldier! What would you do if he had died? How should I have dealt with you then?"

"Well, humanity wouldn't exactly lose anything valuable!" Shizuo snapped back, a sign that he was starting to lose his patience, even with Tom. "As long as I'm in charge of him, I'm not going to let them roam their hands or their dicks on him freely, and that's because you, Commander, ordered me so!" _Do you wish to take your order back? _Was what was insinuated, when they both stopped talking and just stared at each other face to face.

Tom sighed, defeated. Even if he did take his order back, he doubted that Shizuo would quietly obey, because that would mean that he had failed at his task. "I can't let you just get away with this." He finally said. "I'm going to write you up for an extended time of military service as a penalty for excessive display of self-defense during duty conduct." Shizuo simply shrugged at the news. Like he cared about something like that. "And if you do it again, I'm going to have to send you back, where you'll definitely be court-martialed and thrown to jail. You know that."

Now those news stung quite a bit. Shizuo gritted his teeth and cursed inwardly. He had been in that dangerous position many times before, but then, he could control it because it was always about himself. Now it was about someone else. He turned and glared at Izaya, who instinctively took a step back. He wouldn't dare to make Shizuo snap just yet.

"Behave yourself, he didn't do anything." Tom reminded him.

"Yes, and I'm more afraid of the time that he will." Shizuo commented, grunting.

"Can he learn our language? What do you say?" Tom asked as he neared Izaya out of curiosity. Then Izaya took a step near Shizuo again, knowing that it might not be his safest choice, but without being able to help it.

"Ah, no problem about that. He's so smart it gets on my nerves. Cunning little bastard." Shizuo informed him. "He knows stuff. But he can't understand as yet."

"Well, he couldn't, possibly." Tom smiled and raised his hands, trying to show Izaya that he wouldn't attempt to hurt him or touch him. "You sure talk bad about someone you almost became a murderer for."

"I already am a murderer." Shizuo stated the obvious. "Big deal." Then his stomach reminded him of what he had previously set off to do. "Come on, let's go." He said and grabbed Izaya by his arm again, guiding him outside Tom's tent. "We're going to grab something to eat. Once again, thank you for your patronage, Commander Tom."

"Please try to make me worry a little less, Shizuo…" Tom complained in vain, as both of them disappeared at the next corner. "What did I expect…"

If people were outwardly staring at them before, now they were even more obvious in their attempt of avoiding them just as intensely. Shizuo of course didn't give a damn about it, but Izaya was really bothered by the fact that they were hiding whatever they were holding, and even more bothered that they were stopping talking. Trying to learn from Shizuo was like trying to learn from a monk. They would teach you only what they thought you needed to know, meaning the bare minimum. The rest, you had to figure out yourself.

They didn't even have to wait in the line that was formed in order to get food, everyone else just stepped aside. Shizuo just took a middle sized package from the trembling poor man distributing them, threw it on Izaya's arms and then they left the place. Izaya was ready to complain, but Shizuo had left his arm this way, so he closed his mouth. He soon opened it again in awe though, as they reached a place where a huge, metallic caldron was towering above them. Inside the cauldron, Izaya could see that there was water boiling, but he could not see the flames, at least not the flames he knew. There was no wood, but on top of the metallic stand the caldron was seated upon, blue waves of flames were embracing the bottom of it sweetly.

Shizuo noticed how Izaya had glued his eyes on the gas and the way it was heating up the water, and an alarm started going off in his head like crazy. He said nothing though, and he simply requested four buckets of warm water instead of two as he usually did. The person responsible was well informed already and he dared not to make a comment about it, as Shizuo carried hot water for two people like it was nothing.

When they arrived at the tent, Shizuo would have preferred to eat first but the water would get cold and that was something that irritated him incredibly. "Hey!" He called at Izaya, as he was putting down the package as well. "Bath." He told him, and then showed him the buckets and then the low barrel he had in his tent and Izaya had noticed before.

Izaya didn't quite understand what Shizuo was telling him, though he did have a pretty good idea about it, seeing Shizuo emptying one bucket in the barrel, and then reaching out for a weird bottle. He understood completely when Shizuo started stripping in front of him.

Normally, he wouldn't have minded one bit, his people were always taking baths together after all, that was a tradition, but he had been through some… circumstances, since the day before, that made him freeze at his spot. The irrational fear that Shizuo would come attacking him almost took over, in spite of his effort to remain composed. There was nowhere he could run or back away also. Seeing Shizuo taking his shirt off and revealing his well toned upper body, the kind of one that has been through many constant battles, was strangely intimidating, when it shouldn't have any effect, being both men.

Shizuo noticed that Izaya's eyes were trying to hide intense fear, as he was about to get rid of his pants and underwear as well. "I'm not going to hurt you." He said again, and Izaya must have remembered that he had said something like that the day before, because it seemed like he loosened up a bit. "We're just going to take a bath." He said, and showed him the barrel again. "I'm going in first, and I'll be quick, because your water will get cold." He nonchalantly said, and then pulled his pants down, leaving himself completely naked.

If Izaya had tensed up before, now he was left completely petrified. Even though he was never the type to measure somebody's manliness by the size of his genitals, he thought that he himself was hung pretty well, above average yes, but definitely inside normal boundaries. Now, seeing Shizuo, he would have to rethink of that. Shizuo wasn't simply huge, he was enormous, and Izaya found himself still looking for a part of him that wasn't like a monster's. He wondered if he looked so big now, what would he look like with an erection. If he got raped by that…

His knees suddenly felt weak and he would have fallen down if it wasn't for his pride. The thought of Shizuo's dick going in and out inside of him was so terrifying that he couldn't even comprehend it. First of all, it wouldn't fit. And if it didn't, Shizuo would get angry. And if he got angry, he would definitely try to force his way through, and if he did that…

Izaya vowed to himself to never make Shizuo angry. It was just a momentary decision and of course it wouldn't last past their first bathing time, but still, Izaya thought that if Shizuo ever decided to do that to him, Izaya wouldn't dare to protest, and that he would do everything in his power to prevent him from going up his ass, or at the very least, be extremely obedient, thus making so that it wouldn't hurt. Of course that would be next to impossible.

Shizuo had remained absolutely oblivious to Izaya's inner torture, paying no attention to him as he stepped inside the barrel and enjoyed thoroughly the warmth of the water, as he sat at the bottom of it. In the sitting position, the water was reaching only up to his waist but that was pretty satisfying as it was. He threw some more water from the other bucket on top of his head, making his upper body just as wet, and then he grabbed the shampoo bottle, squeezing some in his hand, and then bringing it up his hair and starting scrubbing, making the usual foam appear.

Izaya's curiosity about the bottle and the foam made it easier for him to overcome his illogical fear and very slowly and carefully, he approached the barrel, and consequently, Shizuo. Shizuo saw him nearing and guessed what he was after, so he poured some more shampoo on his hand and then he gave him the bottle. "Shampoo." He just said.

Izaya took the bottle and observed it, held it upside down and tapped at it, giving Shizuo time to wash and scrub the rest of his body. Then he just used the water in his second bucket to rinse himself off the foam. As he stepped outside the barrel, he saw Izaya stealing glances at him but it didn't bother him. He just bent and fished a towel from inside one of his bags and wiped the water off of his body with it, and the tied it around his waist.

"Shizuo-san wa… ii otoko desu ne." Izaya finally said, his eyes gleaming dangerously and perhaps a bit playfully, every sign of fear now gone.

"Huh? I don't understand shit about what you just said." Shizuo just shrugged off Izaya's comment. It might as well have been an insult; Shizuo didn't know and didn't care at this point. He probably wouldn't care even if he knew for a fact that Izaya had just called him a handsome guy. As for Izaya, he would never admit out loud that such a simple act, as Shizuo giving him the bottle, had brought back everything at their usual pace and bathing had just returned to being a normal activity. Plus, a big dick didn't seem to be this frightening after all.

"Shizu-chan."

"Haah? What was that supposed to be now?" Shizuo turned, annoyed. "My name?"

"Yes." Izaya said, and walked up to Shizuo, so close that Shizuo's bare chest and his were almost touching. "Shizu-chan." He almost whispered in a deep, seductive voice, locking eyes with Shizuo, their faces so close that Shizuo could feel Izaya's breath on his lips. Izaya's eyes seemed so magnetizing and powerful, and absolutely beautiful, that for a moment, Shizuo thought that they gleamed red.

That was the first time Izaya made him shiver right through his core. All Shizuo could think about was how dangerous that guy was, without being able to stop the tickling sensation in his abdomen. He didn't know if this was a declaration of war or a seduction attempt, or maybe both, but whichever it was, it seemed perilous enough, because it was downright exciting.

"Cut it out!" He finally said, pushing abruptly Izaya behind with his right arm, dissolving effectively the atmosphere. "And stop calling me that! I don't fucking like it!" He barked. He really didn't like the sound of the nickname but he was actually thankful for it, because if Izaya had used his actual name, he honestly didn't know what he might have ended up doing. So he just turned and emptied the water he had used back at the buckets it had come from, using the two remaining ones, with clean water, for Izaya.

Izaya, on the other hand, was then almost purely convinced that Shizuo wouldn't be the type to stick his dick into him. Well, unless maybe he was provoked so. Izaya was curious to see at what extent he could pull his strings to have Shizuo make a move on him, but even he knew better than that. Setting the matter about dick sizes aside, Shizuo's strength was far more intimidating. In addition, being so interested in Shizuo had started to become annoying even for himself. After all, one of Izaya's principles was to never let himself depend completely on someone else, a principle that need made him step upon so many times these two days.

He casually undid the belt of his yukata, and let it slide down his body, pooling down at his ankles. He then removed the underwear Shizuo had given him and he was left completely naked. That didn't elicit the smallest reaction out of Shizuo. Well of course, he had seen him well enough yesterday, Izaya thought bitterly, as he stepped inside the barrel. He repeated all the moves he had seen Shizuo doing, as the latest one was dressing up with some clean clothes.

"I'm going to tell Kadota to get you another one so you can change when you need to." Shizuo said when he finished dressing up, pointing at Izaya's yukata, and then gathering up the underwear and placing new ones on top of it. From all these words, Izaya understood only 'Kadota' and 'tell', but that was enough.

He would have played with the foam a bit longer, if the water hadn't started to grow cold. He stepped outside the barrel the same moment Shizuo was done rubbing his hair with his towel, trying to dry it up. Shizuo saw him from the corner of his eye and just handed him another towel. By the time Izaya was all dressed up, dry and clean again, he noticed that there was lesser light around them and that meant that the sun had probably started to set. Then he realized how he had completely lost the sense of time. He had probably slept much longer than he used to, and now his stomach had started to growl.

Shizuo was one step ahead of him, already undoing the package they had gotten. He took from inside a big piece of meat, and something else that looked like a big, brown, round shaped object, maybe some kind of …food? Izaya just assumed that it was food. There was no rice.

"I bet they got plenty of vegetables yesterday and today, but they will probably start giving them away by tomorrow." Shizuo said as he took his knife out of his pocket and started cutting the meat in pieces. "For now, try to bear with this." He said, and then he proceeded cutting the bread as well. If he was on his own he would have eaten it as it was, he would have only gotten half of it after all.

Izaya was just sitting there, eyeing the food and saying nothing. He remembered what he had thought when he first saw them attacking the village. That they were monsters and that they would eat them. The thought came back at him at full force, leaving him to wonder if that was human meat. As for the other kind of food, he had never seen it before. He was mostly fixated stealing glances at Shizuo's knife and wondering if he could steal it at any given time.

Shizuo noticed the other man's hesitation. "Meat." He said, touching it as well. "Bread." He added, moving his hand upon it that time. "Eat. It's good." He said, and then grabbed a piece of the meat and took a big bite.

"Meat…" Izaya took a deep breath, watching Shizuo chewing it. "What meat?"

"What do you mean 'what meat'?" Shizuo retorted, annoyed. "Ah, you mean what kind of meat? Hmm…" He was unsure of how to say it to him, but there was no other way around it. It was just smoked pork. "Oink, oink!"

Izaya burst in an uncontrollable laughter and Shizuo instinctively swung a fist at him, which Izaya just as instinctively avoided at ease. "Okay, okay, understand!" Izaya raised his arms up, and tried to control his laughter. "Sorry. You are good, Shizu-chan."

"Cut it the fuck out with that fucking nickname and you're not sorry at all!" Shizuo barked, but Izaya just ignored him and took a bite out of the meat. It was extremely delicious. The taste was indeed foreign, something he had never tried before, but it was so tasty that he quickly forgot all kinds of prejudice. He also tried that 'bread' and that was delicious too. He assumed that it was their version for rice; the taste was kind of similar.

After they finished eating, Shizuo took the buckets and guided Izaya just outside the camp, emptying the water they had used for their bath there. It was common for all of the soldiers to use the surrounding area for when the nature was calling them too, thing that both of them practiced as well.

Being almost outside the camp, Izaya couldn't stop thinking what were the probabilities of making it out of there alive, if he stole Shizuo's knife, cut his neck and then made a run for it, blindly into the woods. Next to zero, he finally decided, but that might change if he planned it more carefully from the next time. Furthermore, it would really be a waste if he left without learning what this new world had to teach him. An unforgivable waste. Even so, he wasn't willing to chase after it if he had to pay for it with his life, or his pride.

By the time he returned in the tent with Shizuo, he had decided that he would remain there a bit longer, but not without planning his escape route first. And for him to feel safer, he would need something.

He tapped Shizuo's shoulder. "Huh? What?" He turned.

"Teach me." Izaya requested of him. His weapons were his knives and his words. He would acquire the knife when Shizuo would fall asleep, but he needed the words now.

"I will, geez!" He nodded and sat down on the bed sheets. "Are you that impatient? Well…" He scanned Izaya's serious face. "Of course you would be…" He vaguely thought that maybe a serious face didn't fit Izaya that much. A mocking smile would be more charming, perhaps… and definitely more annoying! He gritted his teeth at the thought, but started explaining nonetheless.

They stayed up until much later, having an unorthodox lesson. Shizuo didn't have any problems touching Izaya if he needed to explain something, but Izaya had. That's why when Shizuo was trying to explain to him the difference between the mouth and the lips, he gently took Shizuo's hand and put it aside. "On you." He said.

"Ah. Sorry." Shizuo scratched his head. How could this damn monster appear cute, was beyond Izaya. But he did. Didn't he understand that Izaya was his to do as he pleased? Even Izaya understood that much. He could do whatever he wanted; he didn't have to take orders from Izaya about such strange things as personal space, something like that had long ago stopped existing between them. Yet Shizuo obeyed and looked apologetic when Izaya told him to remove his hand. How… weirdly naïve. Izaya offered him that sly smile again. Shizuo glared, but he continued anyway.

The pace at which Izaya was learning was indeed tremendous and even Shizuo was stunned. It was almost out of his world, scary. When he was in school, Shizuo would get scolded and punished all the time because there were so many difficult meanings and things he couldn't understand, and that irritated him. Once, he had thrown a desk out of the window. Okay, maybe twice. Okay, maybe thrice. But only once with the teacher sitting on it.

Unlike him, the complete opposite, was Izaya, who was absorbing the new words in an amazing rhythm. When Shizuo decided to call it enough for the day, Izaya was able to synthesize sentences.

"Shizu-chan is…"

"ShizuO!" He corrected him, but Izaya downright ignored him.

"…is tall… is strong… has blond hair… gets angry…"

"If you keep it up, I definitely will." Shizuo warned him with a growl.

"And…" Izaya's eyes sparked dangerously, as he smiled evilly. "He doesn't like me. That's bad."

"Damn right I don't!" Shizuo confirmed. He had lit up a cigarette in the meanwhile, and he exhaled the smoke gaudily after that last sentence. "I only put up with you and don't bash your head into the ground because I was ordered to keep your measly life safe. But if you try anything funny, I'll break you on the spot."

"Shizu-chan… will break me?" Izaya repeated. It was actually the only part of what Shizuo said that he had understood. "How?" He asked, leaning playfully his head over his left shoulder.

Instead of talking, Shizuo took a straight, long and thin object like a stick from inside his bag, grabbed it from the edges and snapped it in half.

"Understand. Understand very well." Izaya replied, making a dark face and dropping the seductive act. Teasing Shizuo always seemed to backfire. That was making him hate him all the more. "I do not make Shizu-chan angry. Okay?"

"No, that's impossible." Shizuo shot that down, making a deadpan expression. "I get angry just by looking at your face."

Izaya sighed. He still couldn't get anywhere with him. There were plenty of reasons why Shizuo didn't like him, and there were even more reasons why Izaya hated him, more than he could actually count. That's why he was completely taken aback when Shizuo leaned closer, wrapped his arm around his waist, and took him down with him, lying on the bed sheets, Izaya on his back and Shizuo face down above him.

"What… no, NO!" Izaya yelled out, panic clouding his mind, making desperate attempts at pushing the other man away, but to no avail. "No, Shizuo, no!"

"Now I'm Shizuo again, huh? Be quiet you dumbass!" Shizuo chastised him. "We're just going to sleep! Sleep!"

Izaya halted his hasty movements. "S…leep?" He uttered.

"Yes, damn it, sleep! Damn you…" Shizuo grumbled, leaning towards Izaya's left side and letting himself lie there next to him, without removing the hand from the other's waist though. Then he used his other hand to grab the sheets and use them to cover both of their bodies.

Even though they were so close, the sheets were barely covering them. "Those…" Shizuo pointed at the sheets. "Were for one person. Now we are two. We must be close, or it will be cold." He explained in the simplest words he could use. "Understand?" Of course, that wasn't the only reason he had grabbed him like that. He wanted to make sure that Izaya wouldn't try to escape at night, and he didn't want to bother tying him up. If he really was as smart as he seemed, he wouldn't attempt something like that, but just to be sure, he was holding him tightly from his waist. That way, Izaya couldn't go anywhere without waking him up.

He felt Izaya relaxing in his hands and he deduced that Izaya had, once again, understood. He made himself comfortable next to the other guy, and soon enough, sleep came over him.

Izaya remained awake for a long time after Shizuo had fallen asleep, thinking of many things, but mostly about how violently Shizuo had beaten up that guy from before. He was locked in those very arms right then, in a downright deadly embrace and there was no escape from it.

Well unless he worked his way from inside out. That wouldn't work on Shizuo, but it would definitely work on someone else.

Anybody would do.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

There are a lot of things someone can learn during the course of one month. A tenfold of valuable life lessons he could experience. And Izaya had indeed learned some of these. He was proud for some of them, but not so proud for some others.

Lesson number one: Don't anger Shizuo. Never, ever, ever anger Shizuo, under any circumstances. One small tent's width wasn't enough to keep avoiding Shizuo's bat-like punches. Even if he did manage to avoid the first one, that would only serve to anger Shizuo more, and the next one would be even more ferocious. There was a couple of times he thought his arm had been broken, and once, when he slipped and fell down, Shizuo missed and opened a small crater next to Izaya's head, from the force of his punch's strike. Izaya had been so scared that it actually showed on his face and Shizuo had bitterly regretted it, thing that pissed him off even more. And the things they fought about were only trivial, nothing even Izaya could easily predict. He had learned to swallow his pride many times, and each time had a worse taste than the one before.

Lesson number two: The surprises are endless. This new world was so full of unpredictable things, that the moment he would discover something new, his curiosity would blind him so much, making him look like an ignorant child. He learned how guns worked, he learned how the food was cooked and how the water could get so warm, he learned why their clothes were the way they were. He learned that even the smallest things can hold tremendous power. He knew that from before, but now it was taken up on a whole new level.

Lesson number three: Being an outcast. He never was one before, he always knew how to accommodate and blend with his surroundings, but now, with his looks and clothes, he was sticking out like a sore thumb. However, that seemed to prove in itself a valuable experience, because now he could differentiate between more and less cruel people from a totally alternate point of view. There were a total of almost 500 people in the camp, and Izaya wished to examine each and every one, and he did start practicing so, as silently as he possibly could. Many of them were plenty interesting.

But no one was like Shizuo.

First of all, nobody else had his immense and inhuman strength. As Izaya thought, Shizuo was probably the only one in the world with that destructive power. But he was more different than the rest than in just that. He was straightforward, he never lied, he got angry easily and though he wasn't the sharpest flower of the bunch, his eyes could see right through the person in front of him, almost like instinct. His other senses were also heightened, especially his smell. Every time he would take Izaya in his arms at night and bury his face in his hair, he would grudgingly complain that he stunk, even though most of the times they would have had just previously bathed. Izaya deduced that Shizuo just hated the smell of his body, and every step along the way was reminding him more and more of a beast.

Izaya had come to know a lot of people, but he was closer to Commander Tom and Kadota and his gang than anyone else. Besides them, he would rarely speak to someone else, and if he did, he would use very few and simple words. When he finally learned the purpose of why he was being held and not killed there, by Tom, he was more than glad. So Shizuo was truly his guard dog, but for a different reason than what he had imagined at first. Still, he understood very well that Shizuo had the most power to do as he pleased with him than anyone.

As for Kadota, he was a good person at heart, even through his unscrupulous tactics, and about them, so far Izaya only knew that Yumasaki had a girlfriend in his home country, a girl named Erika. Sometimes Kadota would stay and speak with Izaya, but never for too long. Maybe he was sharper than anyone in there.

Everybody was pretty much organized in cliques, but most of them were more mal natured than the others. Shazesh and his gang weren't the only demons waltzing around. The majority of the troop was just like them, making it needlessly difficult for Izaya to explore them in depth, if he was to sum them up. He could almost feel their eyes on him every time he dared to step out of the tent, but not even a fly dared to touch him, after having witnessed Shizuo's wrath. Even those who weren't in front of the scene had seen the battered body of that soldier Shizuo had beaten up, which was hanging onto life by a miserable single thread. Izaya knew that this had probably earned Shizuo many enemies, but Shizuo himself didn't seem to bother.

Those were his thoughts as he was crossing the camp alone, in order to take a newly grinded battle knife to Shizuo, as he was asked to do. He had walked around the camp many times by his own, and even though he didn't like the eyes staring at his every movement, it wasn't something he would be fazed about.

"You need to worry." He told Shizuo, as soon as he stepped inside the tent. He had just caught the other changing shirts.

"Why? You gonna kill me?" Shizuo scoffed, and chuckled ironically. Izaya had to bite his lip so hard to hold back the retort that he almost tore at it. His hands, holding the knife, were literally itching at him as he clutched at it unbelievably tightly.

"Me, no. Your partners, yes." He said, as he handed the knife over, albeit reluctantly. "Their eyes are strong."

"I'm going to cough them out for them then." Shizuo growled and snatched the knife with a swift movement. "Cut their hands and their dicks as well while I'm at it."

"All that about me? I'm so happy." Izaya's voice was dripping with heavy sarcasm, just like his smile of a hyena. "Shizu-chan wants to protect me so much… It's so…"

"Fuck you." Shizuo glared at him, as he shoved the knife into one of his leather bundles and threw it over his shoulder.

"You never do." Izaya replied, folding his arms around his chest and tilting his head slightly at the side.

Shizuo glared at him for some more moments but he didn't respond, because he didn't feel like taking Izaya's provocation anymore. "I'm going out on an expedition today. Don't leave the tent."

"Oh… I see." Izaya lowered his eyes. "I see…" He just repeated, having focused his stare somewhere down on the ground. Shizuo just passed him by, ready to step outside. Then he stopped for some moments, making them stand almost back to back.

"You'll be fine of you don't leave the tent."

"Uh-huh… yeah…" Izaya simply replied.

"I'll be back." Shizuo just said and stepped out, leaving Izaya alone.

It would be a lie if he said that he wasn't worried. It was the first time he would leave Izaya all alone, and he didn't even know for how much time. Thus, making it the first time he couldn't wait for the moment that another ridiculous massacre would be over so he could rush right back in the camp. Although he was positive that no one would dare to touch Izaya and that they would have many other things to keep them occupied, he still wasn't one hundred per cent sure. And there was also… the psychological effect…

He tried to light up a cigarette in order to calm his nerves down, but the lighter, much to his dismay, was already out of gas. He had the small suspicion that meeting Izaya made him want to smoke much more often than before. Outside the tent. Izaya couldn't stand the smell inside the tent.

A couple of passerby soldiers watched in horror as Shizuo crashed the cigarette with his right hand and then stomped the lighter down with his left foot. The battle hadn't even started and Shizuo was already in a foul mood. That was never a good sign… for either side.

Izaya planned to do exactly as Shizuo instructed him, but he knew much better than Shizuo how things worked in every human society, small or big. He had also noticed that every time the soldiers were going on an expedition, a quarter of them stayed behind. Shizuo had stayed behind a couple of times since the month before, in order to stay with Izaya, but Izaya guessed that he was unable to postpone it anymore. And even the screams at night every time after an expedition didn't mean much if Shizuo was by his side. Only that those were the only nights Izaya would turn around and return Shizuo's hug until they would fall asleep.

But now Shizuo wasn't around and Izaya was left without his last resort. Well… the next to last resort. Because he had already noticed and counted who stayed behind and who left each time.

So what happened about an hour after the main part of the platoon left wasn't something he was actually surprised about.

"Heeeey…! Shizuo's exclusive sweetie pie…!"

Izaya turned around to see the person he already expected. He was sure that Shazesh would purposely stay behind this time. And he was of course right, as he came face to face with the intimidating black haired man, who had just shamelessly stepped foot inside Shizuo's tent. Behind him he could see other figures of men and he could also hear their chuckling. He sighed.

"Could I help you with something?" He said, absolutely perfectly in their language, both in his grammar and accent.

Shazesh froze on his tracks, his lewd smile turning into an ugly grimace for some moments. But he quickly got over the shock. "Yeah, you see… I have a really… _hard_ problem that I need you to take care of!" Laughter erupted from all those thugs behind him.

"Seriously? _That's_ your line?" Izaya chuckled on his own, as he folded his arms across his chest. "Oh come on. You could do better than that!"

He heard murmuring outside the tent, and he was certain that they were commenting how good he was at speaking their language. He never spoke much exactly because he wanted to keep the element of surprise as his weapon, and it was slowly working. He never even spoke in a complicated way even in front of Shizuo, but he was sure Shizuo knew already.

"Well, I don't actually have to, you little shit, do I?" Shazesh maintained his smile but his face darkened considerably.

Izaya would have liked to tease him some more but he had neither the time nor the space to deal with the consequences. "No… you don't." He said, seriously this time, unfolding his arms. "You see… all I want is to stay alive. If some suicidal bastards come on to me I have no intent to stop them at the cost of my own life."

"You'll lose your life anyway, you arrogant piece of fuck!" Shazesh's smile had now completely turned into a snarl, as he stepped over and came within a breath's distance away from Izaya. "I'm going to crush your neck after I'm finished with you, and then I'm going to drop you right on that bastard Heiwajima's feet, so that he would know, after I break his valuable possession, that he ain't going around fucking messing with my fucking men! GOT IT?"

It wasn't the first time that Izaya was hearing Shizuo's last name, but it always surprised him, about the meaning it held in his own language. Quiet man on a peaceful island. What an irony. "Well then, that makes us, future dead men, at least two now, doesn't it? And more. Let me see." He said casually, as he walked slowly around Shazesh and pretended to count how many men were outside. "One, two, three…"

"YOU FUCKING-" Shazesh shot his hand to catch Izaya from the front side of his robes, but Izaya easily jumped on the side and avoided it.

"Shizuo isn't going to forgive you. Not because he likes me, mind you." Izaya kept on talking. "Because he really, really hates it when other people steal away _his_ things, or mess with _his_ stuff." He reminded him. "What would be left of you to do then?"

"Of course we're going to teach him a lesson!" Shazesh said, starting to regain his composure. This was weird, he didn't usually lose it.

"Oh? Is that so?" It could be amazing just how much fear Shizuo's existence could inspire. "So, you're telling me that you're going to try and teach Shizuo Heiwajima a lesson, a Shizuo coming out of the battlefield, pissed off to the outmost extent, with weapons and comrades near him, and then you're going to piss him off some more by destroying something of his. Is that what you're saying?"

Shazesh laughed a bit. "When the fuck did you learn to speak like that…" He shook his head in amusement. "But no matter what you say, cutie, I'm going to stick it into you today. Because I feel like it." He said, looking at Izaya straight in the eyes again.

"That's weird. I always knew that in battles, you first kill the enemy, and then you enjoy the trophy." Izaya pointed out. "Doing it backwards, I didn't know that I, a guy in his mid twenties, was so irresistible…!"

"What do you want to say?" Shazesh suddenly got all serious. He had caught up to what Izaya had implied.

"That this lose-lose situation doesn't benefit either of us." Izaya's eyes shone. "How would you like to turn this around?"

"…What do you mean?" Shazesh was intrigued and he didn't know when something started burning inside of him. Looking at Izaya's full of fire eyes just gave him that feeling. Something like that he now had some hope he didn't have before. Another way nobody had thought about, something that no one else could make it reality.

"I told you already my motive. I want to live. And I know your motive. You want to get revenge on Heiwajima Shizuo. If you kill me or violate me now, we both die. But…" He paused, making sure Shazesh was clinging on what he had to say for dear life. "…if you bring me Shizuo's head in a silver platter, then you'll have earned everything you wanted! Revenge for your comrade, satisfaction for yourself, and even me if you'd still like to do so!" Izaya started walking up and down, hands in the air, with a thrilling aura surrounding him. "Imagine that! 'The Man who Beat the Monster'! Who's going to deny that Shazesh is the Boss then?"

"Killing Heiwajima Shizuo…" Shazesh repeated. It would be a lie if he said that he had never thought about that, but he had always quickly dismissed the thought because it sounded too dangerous, for him and for his men. But now, with the way Izaya was talking, it made him think that it was actually possible. He did want it after all, didn't he? "But… that's difficult…"

"If it was easy, somebody might have already done it so far!" Izaya reminded him. "And that's what's going to make you, all the more important. Someone who killed the guy nobody else could. Someone special. A charismatic, absolute leader!"

"Yeah, but…" Shazesh still had his doubts, but Izaya's words were really starting to get to him. "What's up for you if I really were to do that?"

"What's up for me? Don't be ridiculous. Everything." Izaya stopped walking up and down and lowered his arms, his back turned at Shazesh. "I want to live, and I don't think I'll last for too long if I keep being near Shizuo." He then turned and looked at the other man, with an unreadable expression on his face. "Think about it. How much does it take for Shizuo to lose it? How quickly or hard does he strike if he does? Do you now have any idea how closely I have avoided death so far?"

"I bet he's pretty rough on you in bed too." That lewd smile made an appearance again on Shazesh's face, this time from ear to ear. "Not that I wouldn't like to do that too…!"

Izaya smirked. "He hasn't touched me yet." He said, enjoying the other man's disbelieving expression. "I think he's waiting for something." That was a borderline lie of course, but it always worked. Izaya loved these. "If you hurry up and kill him quickly, you can even get me as a virgin… well, if you will still be interested in someone like me, of course."

"You say that you have better chances surviving in my lair than in Shizuo's?" Shazesh's smile was growing even wider if that was possible. "You know, I'm a generous guy. I'm not like Shizuo… I like to… you know, share!" He tilted his head and showed Izaya outside, and the men waiting there.

"So, you're saying that I don't?"

"Nah, don't worry." Shazesh threw his hand down, like dismissing the thought. "We're not like Heiwajima. We're civilized! Even if we… you know, share a bit, we won't kill you. You have my word about that!"

Izaya wanted to ask Shazesh if he had forgotten where exactly Izaya had come from and what he had exactly seen that night in the cages, including Shazesh and his men murdering with the worst ways possible poor teenage girls, but now wasn't the time for it. He had one last push to make. "Do whatever you like, but please don't go attacking Shizuo head to head like barbarians. That would definitely lower my chances of survival."

"Don't worry honey." Much to Izaya's displeasure, Shazesh had started again calling him sweet names, but that was a sign he was in a good mood again. "We're going to make all the necessary preparations before we strike. And you…" He finally got close to Izaya, as he had wanted to do so from the start. "…you're going to help us. Are you not?" He said, and then cupped Izaya's cheek with his right hand.

It was extremely difficult for Izaya to hide his disgust and repulsion, but he somehow managed, by swallowing hard the lump that had formed in his throat. "That goes without saying. Any kind of information you may require."

"That's my boy."Shazesh bent to kiss Izaya's cheek but Izaya stepped behind, putting his index finger upon the other guy's lips.

"The reward is for after you kill the Monster." He whispered, in a kind of sensual way. That made Shazesh's pants tightened up immediately, and he offered Izaya a half smile before turning around quickly and stepping outside of the tent, because otherwise he would have felt the need to bang the bastard right there, and their great plan would be ruined. Izaya could hear him talking with his men, and their half-hearted protests as their footsteps started fading away.

He waited for a good whole minute after the footsteps had slowly disappeared, and then he slowly sprawled himself on the sheets of his and Shizuo's makeshift bed. He was trembling slightly, just like the first night Shizuo had taken him in. But the fact that the sheets were full of Shizuo's smell calmed him down quite quickly. Soon, he had regained his usual calmness.

"Wow. Somehow, I was saved…!" He said loudly but in his own language. "Sorry, Shizu-chan!" He giggled, thing that indicated that he wasn't sorry at all. "You won't die that easily after all, right?" He took a good sniff out of the sheets for one more time. "But…" He said, slowly putting the sheet down. "Maybe it would be better if you actually did die, you know…"

It was amazing, he thought, once again. No matter how much everyone hated, feared and despised Shizuo, nobody had actually thought seriously of killing him, even though it could be as simple as a bullet in the head, or a slash in the neck… well, could it? Maybe they were thinking that Shizuo's head was so hard that the bullet would bounce off, or that the knife would break on his neck. Humans do have the tendency to exaggerate, after all, especially when they see something out of the ordinary, but Izaya knew exactly how tender Shizuo's neck was. And he would have buried his knife into it long ago if it wasn't for Shazesh and bastards of his kind surrounding him. Not that he could avoid them for long, after today.

No matter how badly they would fight with Shizuo, he had never outwardly humiliated him, or even tried to. He might have grabbed his hair a couple of times, but only when Izaya would deliberately provoke him, to see how far he would go. He had never forced him to kneel, he had never slapped him, and he had never pulled at his clothes. So far, that was, but Izaya was sure that this just wasn't Shizuo's style. If Shizuo got angry, he would just punch his opponent. Tactics like humiliating the other to prove his own superiority, Shizuo simply wouldn't practice.

For a reason, that made Izaya hate him even more.

As for Shizuo himself, so far he was forced to deal with many unpleasant things all at once. Seeing a village burning and innocent people killed in front of his eyes was never his favorite part of the day, but now there was something inside him that made him feel restless and anxious and it just wouldn't go away. In every step he thought he was seeing Izaya getting killed, when he knew very well that he was still in the camp.

"SHIT!" He finally roared and started destroying everything in his path. Why did he have to worry about that fucking insect, whose only purpose in life seemed to be to irritate and make fun out of him? It was so annoying, annoying, ANNOYING! He inwardly screamed, as he was punching through some walls.

When he got back in the end, he was a wreck. When Izaya saw him stepping inside the tent, he couldn't help but wonder if Shazesh would have had actually stood a chance against him. Shizuo had his clothes almost tattered, and he was from head to toes covered with mud, dust and what Izaya guessed would be human blood. And also…

"Why are you covered in black dust?" He asked him.

Shizuo just stayed there for some seconds, staring at Izaya, analyzing if something, even a single hair from his head, was out of place. When he deduced that it was not, he sighed and replied: "Um… I might have accidently… stepped inside a fire or something..."

"Are you an idiot?" Izaya said, exasperated, holding his head with the palm of his hand.

"Would you like this idiot to kill you now?" Shizuo growled.

"No, please spare me if you could." Izaya said indifferently. "This poor housewife of yours was even looking ahead for you and went and took some water earlier…" He said, pointing at two buckets near the barrel. "…if of course, your Excellency would compromise with a cold bath." When Shizuo was ready to open his mouth and swear at him, Izaya cut him short: "Which I'd strongly advise that you should."

"You are no housewife." Shizuo mumbled in irritation but started taking his clothes of nonetheless. He knew exactly why the water was cold.

"Of course not. You fuck that."

"Would you fucking stop that?" Shizuo barked at him, while stepping inside the barrel, and flinching at the cold water. "Why do you keep saying that? Do you want me to fuck you that badly?"

"Who knows!" Izaya chirped and dumped more cold water on Shizuo, wetting his hair, and enjoying the shiver that it caused the other man, so strong that it was visible. Then he proceeded to take some shampoo in his hand, kneel behind the other man and then apply it on his hair, massaging his head to make the foam. "If I said I did, what would you do?"

"I'd say you lied." Shizuo pointed out, making Izaya laugh a bit. "What's wrong?"

Izaya froze for some seconds, but then he continued like before. "What do you mean?"

"You've never before washed my head…"

"You're tired, you came for battle. I just want to make sure you're spotless before you come to sleep next to me."

"Are you saying that I can't even wash myself, you bastard?" Something inside Shizuo snapped. He would lash out at the next given chance.

"All I'm saying is you're tired." Izaya said so softly, that Shizuo's anger swiftly evaporated. "That's all. That's all I'm saying…"

Shizuo turned to face him. "What's wrong Izaya?"

"Nothing is wrong." Izaya gave him a little reassuring smile, and after some moments, Shizuo turned again to face forward, like before.

They spent a couple of minutes in silence, before Shizuo spoke again. "Did anything happen while I was gone?"

"Nope. Not a thing." Izaya chirped again.

Shizuo was ready to tell him in his face that he didn't believe him, but even he had some sense of tact left. Izaya looked just like he did when he left him, and he smelled just like it as well. Shizuo was certain that nobody had touched him but still, the uneasiness wouldn't go away.

He still wouldn't let go of the feeling that something was wrong, even when they went to bed and Izaya buried himself inside of Shizuo's arms, without complaints. The screams from outside could be clearly heard by now, even though they were far away this time. Shizuo knew that this change he was feeling had something to do with that night being what it was, but something, telling him that this wasn't all, still bugged him.

In the end, they fell asleep like this, just like in any other usual night. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

"HEY!" Shizuo yelled, already irritated, going through his stuff. "Shit! We're out of drinkable water!"

"Well then, go and get some." Izaya simply retorted, as he was sitting down unpacking their usual food portion, coming face to face with meat yet again for a hundredth time. Shizuo's people surely loved meat… and had lots of it.

"Oh, fuck it! It's too much trouble!" Shizuo exclaimed, as he settled himself noisily down next to Izaya, ready to have his lunch.

Izaya just kept watching him. "You know we'll get thirsty later, right?"

Shizuo shrugged. "You go. I spent the entire day cutting down trees…"

"…ripping trees right off their roots you mean…" Izaya corrected him.

"Same result."

"Oh, right."

"Anyways!" Shizuo decided to ignore Izaya's usual sarcasm, although it was at a lower level than before. "It was boring and troublesome and now I don't feel like moving! So come on, go and get some water!"

"No. I don't want to get out there." Izaya stated, in a serious and disarming tone.

Shizuo didn't say anything for some moments. "…they have cleaned everything up by now."

"It still reeks of blood."

Well, that was indeed the truth. But it just got on Shizuo's nerves every time he was talking back at him. "Wow! I didn't know you were this sensitive!"

"Heeeh? Well, isn't this world just full of surprises!" Izaya shot him the most dangerous smile he had shot him so far. "Don't worry Shizu-chan, I'll bet you'll have plenty of opportunities to gaze upon the shattered fragments of my fragile soul!"

Shizuo wasted no time grabbing him by the neck and slamming him down. Izaya hissed as the back of his head hit the hard surface but didn't react in any other way. He just kept passively looking at Shizuo, who was also looking down as he stood on top of him.

"You've also gotten quite talkative. What was that just now, a line from a poem or something?" Shizuo glared at him with all of his might. "I didn't know you knew such elaborate and difficult speech…"

"There are plenty of things you don't know about me…" Izaya almost whispered as he raised his leg and rubbed it against Shizuo's thigh, but that earned him and even tighter grip on his neck, making it difficult to breathe, so he stopped. "Seriously, Shizu-chan, you'd be surprised if you realized how quickly you can learn a language if your life depends on it!" His voice came out strangled, of course.

Shizuo eased his grip, but still didn't let him go. "I don't speak like this. Where did you learn it from?"

Izaya rolled his eyes. "Yumasaki had some books and he taught me some more words… I can't read them though." The truth was, he had learned over his half vocabulary by Kadota's group.

Shizuo left his neck almost instantly. Well, that explained everything as far as he was concerned. But still, he couldn't get over the suspicion he was left with since the day before. But when he turned around and the smell of the meat hit his nostrils, he remembered that he had other, more pressing matters to think of right then.

He waited for Izaya to sat up as well, as he did, rubbing his freshly attacked neck. "If I go for water, will you come with me?" Shizuo seemed finally ready to compromise.

Izaya sighed. "What am I necessary for?"

"Nothing really…"

Izaya just looked Shizuo in the eyes. "Aw, does Shizu-chan enjoy my company so much he doesn't want me to leave his side, ever?"

A vein popped dangerously over Shizuo's forehead. It was just so undeniably tempting to break Izaya's face, every time he would open his damn mouth. "That isn't going to get you out of it! Get up! …And it was better when you didn't speak!"

"Then you shouldn't have kept me."

Suddenly, the air around them weighed a tone, even if it was just for a few seconds.

"I didn't keep you for your chatting company!" Shizuo spat out. "You know very well why you have been kept here!"

Izaya narrowed his eyes. "Of course I do. Do you?"

One of the reasons Izaya didn't exactly feel like he belonged in the human world, that he was something far out of it and above it, thus being allowed to love its subjects, was that he never let his emotions get the better of him. That he was never swept away. Watching humans was about as fascinating as watching living beings get swept by a powerful torrent, the amusing part being when he could observe the way they would react to regain control of themselves and their lives. Watching them was fun. And he always thought he wanted to be one of them. That it would be fun for a powerful emotion to consume him and completely control him. But now, an emotion was spilling out and he tried his best to contain it. He didn't like this feeling. He didn't like any of the feelings Shizuo was stirring up in him, and definitely not this one of pure rage.

But, being Izaya, he was able to regain his composure in a few moments. He raised his hands up, just when Shizuo had opened his mouth to obviously roar an answer back at him. "Okay. You are right. We both know why I'm here. I'm sorry for angering you." Shizuo halted his attack. Then Izaya raised his head and looked at him in the eye, with a resigned expression on his face. "I'm sorry. I'll do anything you want."

Shizuo felt his heart twitching at those words. He knew that this 'anything' hadn't just one meaning. Izaya was a captive of war. They couldn't go around forgetting their positions and acting like equals. Even though Shizuo had never felt superior to Izaya in any way. Not inferior of course either.

"Che, do you think that all it takes is an apology? You think that's all it takes to stop me from being angry?" Best defense was attack, but he couldn't understand why he felt the need to defend himself. And that pissed him off even more.

"What more do you want from me?"

This time, the twitching was even more intense, but Shizuo wouldn't recognize it as guilt, not damn fucking ever! "To shut up and do as I'm telling you! Listen, you…" Shizuo just sighed, and ruffled his own hair. "This is war. You should be glad you still have your life. What more do I want from you… nothing. I just… don't piss me off."

"Shizu-chan, you're not exactly the most difficult person to piss off…" Izaya shrugged, even though he was surprised by Shizuo's answer. "What could I do in front of you?" He shook his head left and right like he couldn't help it.

"Damn you, you bastard!" Shizuo barked, his anger coming back at full force and overstepping easily the guilt, as he took a step towards Izaya. "You know VERY well what makes another person lose it! That's why I don't fucking like you! I hate violence and you're the fucking trigger!"

"Oh? So it's my fault if you hit me?" Izaya let out in a low voice, almost menacing.

"Very damn right it is! Every single time, you cause…"

"So it's my fault if I get raped? It's my fault if I get killed?" This was the first time Shizuo was hearing Izaya raising his voice. "It's my fault if my hometown is destroyed? It's my fault that you just waltzed into my country, killing people like me? Don't you dare to think that!" Izaya's voice was dripping venom. "Don't you dare, to think that I'm the one starting up the violence here. I won't take any lectures from murderers."

That would have hit Shizuo hard, had it been said some years before. But now, it was just old news. "Well, you should." Shizuo's voice was cold. "Because each person is responsible for whatever happens to them."

"So all those people, killed and tortured at your kind's hands, were responsible for it?" Izaya's lips formed a disbelieving smile. "You really are a monster."

This was the first time Izaya was calling Shizuo a monster at his face. He had been called that many times before, but hearing it from Izaya was somehow much worse. So much worse. "Well, if you don't like being with that monster, I can arrange you go and live under the protection of some other monster. I bet there will be plenty others who would be happy to take you."

And the conversation was over, just like that. Suddenly, Izaya felt that the blood inside his veins was running cold. He looked down and he hugged his own arms, trying to subjugate the shivers running through his body. He desperately tried not to show it but there was no way the motion would escape Shizuo.

The need to resort to the previous comment, combined with Izaya's reaction, made Shizuo's self-loathing reach an entire new level. He immediately regretted everything he said, he regretted getting angry over something that trivial as for who was going to get water… he just regretted everything so much he thought his chest was going to burst. Though, looking at Izaya again, he was convinced that it wasn't his fault entirely, but that didn't make it any better at all.

This was bad. They needed to clear their heads a bit. Shizuo decided it would be better if they just got out and walked. Without saying anything he just took some more steps forward and grabbed Izaya by his arm, trying to get him out of the tent.

"NO!"

It was almost a scream. Shizuo was stunned to turn and see Izaya almost exactly like he had seen him when he had first taken him to his tent. Like a frightened animal. "I-Izaya…"

"No, no, no, no!" The other man shook his head violently, always facing the ground, never Shizuo, clutching the hand that was grabbing at him for dear life. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I' m sorry! I'll do anything, Shizuo! Please don't… please, please, I'll… "

"What? No, we're just going to get some water!" The trembling, the frantic movements… Shizuo didn't know what to think.

"No, you'll give me away…" His knees had even gotten weak.

"I'm not giving you anywhere! Stop acting like a child! Look at me!" Shizuo grabbed Izaya by the chin and made him look upwards, straight in his eyes. Izaya's were wide and terrified, but Shizuo's were stern and honest. "I'm not giving you up! Got it?"

Like a magic spell had been used, Izaya's breathing steadily became even and he was back at his usual self in a couple of minutes. Though he knew, that he would have to carry the shame of losing it and begging Shizuo for the rest of his life. The fire inside him burned viciously, his hatred for Shizuo being flamed anew. He especially hated how the words 'I'm not giving you up' could have such an effect on him.

As for Shizuo, he let Izaya go and did consider apologizing, but concluding that Izaya wouldn't want that, he decided otherwise. "Come on, let's go." He halted a bit. "Do you want to come?"

Izaya nodded. "Yeah, I'll come." He said and he followed Shizuo out of the tent. It would be best if either of them never again mentioned what had just happened, but one could never be sure how Shizuo would react. He was still a closed book for Izaya, while for everyone else he seemed so open. Maybe Izaya was used to always search for something more other than the surface. Shizuo wasn't shallow, far from it. Whatever it was, they both needed to get their minds on a fresh page, and quickly.

As for Shizuo, he knew very well where Izaya was coming from. Although he didn't believe that Izaya was entirely right, there were no words he could offer in his own defense about what he and everyone else around him was doing. It was a war of conquest, people were getting killed, atrocities were committed, like it was the normal and usual thing to happen every day. People like Izaya, were losing everything, home, families, loved ones, and of course the ones responsible were soldiers like Shizuo. But that would happen even if Shizuo wasn't there. And there was simply no place else a person like him could belong to, aside from the battlefield. For Shizuo, it was a job. A job for monsters.

He glanced at the man walking beside him. He had thought that protecting someone at least would have made him hate himself less, but obviously Izaya was a wrong choice. Not only he had a special way of making Shizuo hate himself even more than he was ever able to imagine, with every single one of his poisonous comments, there definitely had to be better people out there who deserved someone's protection. He was sure that even Izaya would agree on that. And yet, and even so, he couldn't imagine himself walking beside anybody else. Well, he could, but it wouldn't be… it wouldn't be as…

Complicating thoughts were never Shizuo's forte. Just at the time he was ready to get pissed off again, he saw a familiar white coat passing through in front of him.

"Doctor Lynch!" He called at him. The man briefly turned around, glanced at them, swiftly waved towards Shizuo, in an attempt of greeting him, and then he quickly resumed his way.

For a doctor, Izaya noticed that he wasn't looking all that healthy. He was tall, very skinny, with a face almost yellow, sunken cheeks, high cheekbones and gleaming, gray eyes. The few strands of hair that had remained on his head were also gray. He was almost scary. "Who was that?"

"You know him. He was the one that looked at your arm the first time I hit you."

Izaya was ready to say that he was so sorry to have forgotten such a fun memory, but he was still shaken up from before. "Hooh… He sure doesn't seem so healthy for a doctor." He remembered the doctor he knew. He was sure that Shinra lived somewhere, oblivious to the catastrophe, having a sweet lucky married time with his wife. He envied that man like nobody else in the entire world.

"Some people just can't deal with the pressure." Shizuo shrugged. "He is a good man. That's what got to him in the first place. I think he operated on a poor kid rather than a wealthy man and now he's here. What he sees every day must have really gotten to him." That alarm in his head started ringing again, reminding him that feeding Izaya with information about other people was probably a bad idea, but he chose to ignore it this time.

Izaya froze in his tracks. "What do you mean?"

"I don't remember details, but I think that in the hospital…"

"No, not that!" Izaya cut him off. "I mean, that too, but… what do you mean got to him? He didn't come here voluntarily?"

Shizuo offered him a bitter smile. "Almost no one is here voluntarily. Think about it, who would you want to send somewhere they might never get back from?"

"The criminals. Society's misfits." It was something that Izaya had already suspected, but didn't have anything that could prove it to him. Except for those words. Of course, someone like Shizuo, with his temper and his strength, had no place there. They were all ostracized, and Izaya's country was paying the price. "That's what happened with you."

"That's what happened with me."

Izaya bit back every kind of comment that came into his mind, because Shizuo's words about giving him to someone else, were still too fresh in his mind. It was so vexing. Now would have been the perfect chance to stomp on Shizuo's feelings mercilessly and perhaps to never allow him get back at his feet emotionally ever again. Hm, maybe he would need some more time for that…

"I know what you're thinking." Shizuo casually said, leaving Izaya speechless once again. "That it was natural, since a monster can't live in a society of humans, right?"

Izaya didn't say anything, yet again.

"Cat got your tongue?" Shizuo taunted him. "Say something. I'd prefer you mostly silent though."

"Do you have a family, Shizu-chan?"

Now, that was truly the last kind of information Shizuo wanted to feed Izaya. "Well, I didn't sprout off of the ground, did I?"

"You could be an orphan. Do you have someone waiting back in your home? Parents, siblings, a girlfriend or two maybe?"

"That's none of your fucking business!"Shizuo just snapped back at him. Izaya could easily see that he was now once again enraged, but now it was absolutely fun! So, family was a touchy issue for Shizuo… Thinking about it was like popping a candy in his mouth.

"I have two sisters. Twins." Izaya said, purposely not mentioning his parents (there wasn't something interesting about them, anyway), or his wife. "Fourteen year olds. I hope I still have them, seeing what your group does to fourteen year old girls and boys."

Shizuo didn't comment on it. "I didn't ask you."

"Well, I just told you."

When they finally got back at their tent and resumed eating and drinking that god damn water that had stirred so much trouble, Izaya was in an undeniably good mood, while Shizuo was feeling like he had just eaten bricks. He couldn't deal with this guy. He just had a talent to bring out the worst in him.

So he just lied down at the sheets, making a pillow with his hands behind his head, and observed him, as he was going through lots of new to him stuff yet again. Now Shizuo remembered as well; the first time he had hit him was because Izaya had accidentally turned on the flashlight, and then got so startled by the light, that he threw it away and it found Shizuo on the forehead. The second time, he had found Shizuo's lighter and set fire to the tent, not on purpose of course but they had started fights for infinitely less… thank God he wasn't an idiot enough to start fiddling with a gun.

Now he was playing with a toothbrush, like the one Shizuo had snapped at one of their first meetings, to describe him how he would break him. What for, he already knew how to use this one… Shizuo took his eyes off of the object and started observing Izaya's body, and his movements as well. How could he move in those robes? Weren't they impractical?

That was about how long he could prevent his thoughts from delving into a darker issue: Should he try to fuck him or not. He already knew what Izaya's body was like. And he knew very well that soon, many others in the camp would start keeping whoever they wanted, in order to be able to have regular sex, besides just that one night in the expedition. He had never done that before, but now that it just happened to keep someone in his tent, why shouldn't he?

Many reasons. The main one being that it would be a very, very bad idea. Izaya would never want it, and even if he didn't resist, it was sure that something like that would make their daily life absolutely unbearable. Being already this close to Izaya was bad enough, sticking it into him seemed more dangerous than anything else. Although… maybe… maybe he would become more obedient? Maybe they could find a common ground?

"Izaya."

"Hmm? What is it?" He replied, leaving the toothbrush in its place and then searching for something else.

"Wanna have sex?"

Izaya halted his movements, but his lips formed a small smile. "Are you sure you want to do it with someone like me?"

"No, I just asked." Shizuo simply answered. "Are you sure you want to do it with someone like me?"

"Well, it doesn't matter what I want, does it?" That conversation reminded him of something.

"If it didn't, I wouldn't ask you."

"Really now." Izaya turned and offered Shizuo one of his rarest, sincere smiles, just a line across his lips. Shizuo even thought that he looked beautiful. "Shizu-chan really is kind." He then put his hands on his knees and propped himself up. "Sure then. Why not."

Shizuo just stared at him for a couple of moments, without moving an inch from his lying position. "Nah, forget it." He finally stated, turning his body on the other side from the one Izaya was standing.

"Oh, come one Shizu-chan!" Izaya laughed a bit, his smile now crooked. "I thought he could finally have some fun together!"

"Just how much fun can a person that was trembling like a fish out of the water right now have, just in the mere possibility of it?" Shizuo shot him down more than effectively. "End of conversation."

Izaya's hands formed so tight fists that the nails could break his skin any moment now. Of course he would bring it up. Of course! But he wasn't done yet, and the smirk hadn't left his lips. "Oh, Shizu-chan, you know that was because it would have been with some other guy… not with you!" He strolled across the space between them and finally kneeled just next to Shizuo's turned back. "You know…" He mustered his most seductive voice, and leaned close to Shizuo's ear. "It's fine if it's you…" He tried to reach and touch Shizuo's shoulder, but Shizuo's hand was quicker, as it darted and caught Izaya's wrist without any hesitation.

"I can't even describe to you how much I hate your rotten lies!" Shizuo spat out, and finally turned to face Izaya, who had come a bit too close for comfort. "Why are you playing with me like this, huh? Is it so much fun?"

Izaya couldn't help but burst out laughing. "Of course it's fun, Shizu-chan, of course it's fun!" He kept on laughing so hard that tears started to form in the corners of his eyes.

"You're deranged." Shizuo's expression could easily be considered worried, as he kept staring at Izaya who just kept laughing. He was right; He shouldn't have even mentioned anything. He didn't even have any serious intention of doing something like it and now Izaya would be even more wary of him than before. It was so stupid!

Izaya's laughter halted abruptly. "And you are a monster; I guess that makes us even." It was satisfying seeing Shizuo narrowing his eyes, clearly indicating that he had struck a nerve. "But I wish you would play with me a bit more."

Before Shizuo could realize it, Izaya threw the hand Shizuo was holding on the ground and used it as leverage to swiftly climb on top of him, his legs at either side of Shizuo's thighs. Now suddenly, Izaya was looking down at him with his usual smug expression.

"Move it." Shizuo just said, but he didn't make any motion to throw him off of him. He just stayed there, looking up at the face that was causing him so much grief.

"No, Shizu-chan looks so cute from this angle." Izaya said and used his free hand to trace Shizuo's lips. Generally it would be a bad idea, giving that he had some day seen Shizuo breaking iron with those teeth, but he never resisted bad ideas anyways. And when he felt Shizuo's hand cupping and roaming up and down his thigh, he couldn't help but widen his devilish smile. It felt good. It felt more than good. Shizuo was acting like predicted. The thought was enough to make Izaya melt and it showed in his gleaming eyes. "Shizu-"

And then, the hand caressing his thigh suddenly tightened on it, and with a violent tackle, Izaya suddenly found himself with his back on the ground, hitting it with force, and with Shizuo on top of him, his knees between Izaya's legs. It was rough but it was exactly what Izaya had wanted, so the wolfish grin decorating his face wouldn't go away. As he looked up and came face to face with Shizuo's own devilish grin, he vaguely remembered how big Shizuo was and he shuddered, but there was no turning back from there now…

"Don't underestimate me, you little bastard." Shizuo stated, every ounce of uncertainty he had before now gone. He now knew what needed to be done, what Izaya truly wanted. He didn't know how, but it suddenly all made sense in his head. "I might be a monster that nobody loves because of this accursed strength, but I'm never going to become the kind of monster you would want me to be. You cursed little insect!"

And with those words, he got up, leaving Izaya's smile to freeze on his lips. He turned around and left the tent, leaving Izaya alone, barely sitting up and looking at his retreating form.

"Really, Shizu-chan." He finally whispered after some moments. "I hate you. I hate you so much!"

_I hate you so much, if only could you just die! _


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

"So, Shizuo, how are things going with our interpreter?"

That must have been the first time Tom was actually afraid of the look Shizuo shot at him. He had seen him angry lots of times before, but after Izaya's entrance there was a special kind of menacing black aura surrounding him. Tom had even started regretting that he entrusted Shizuo with that responsibility, even though he knew very well that there was no other way they could acquire and use an interpreter. But now, given the current situation, he wasn't even sure they needed one.

"Fine…" Shizuo growled.

"Ah… I see… well…" Tom honestly wanted to change the subject, but, being connected to what he needed to tell Shizuo, that was impossible. "I'm not sure he's going to be needed, the way things are progressing…"

Tom saw Shizuo freezing up, as his eyes widened in an indescribable surprise. "…What?" He finally managed to utter.

"As you know, our platoon is the first one to step on land, and it consists only of five hundred men. Even with such a small number, we have managed to keep our losses at the minimum and the conquest is progressing without any problems…"

"Yes, because we've never crossed paths with an organized army! All we do is burn up villages and…" Shizuo pursed his lips like he had just tasted something bitter.

"Exactly, and that's because we never gave them the chance to do it." Tom put his elbows on his private and only desk and intertwined his fingers. "We're progressing way too quickly. Their means of resistance are far too outdated. Soon, we will need to move the entire camp further inside the land. And now, we just got transmissions from other platoons of the battalion, explaining how they have also landed and already launched attacks and advanced further." Tom narrowed his eyes. "This is unprecedented. It's too quick and too violent. I think that there may not even be a need for any kinds of negotiations. Do you understand me?"

Shizuo gritted his teeth, grinding the cigarette between his lips in the process. "This is way too fucked up, Commander Tom. Way too ugly…"

"I know." Tom sighed. "Look at the bright side of it. It will end way more quickly than we had calculated." He took his hands off the table and leaned back at his chair. "But if that happens, we won't be needing an interpreter."

Shizuo's breath was caught up at his throat, for reasons unknown, as he insisted to tell himself. "What… do you want me to do with him, then?"

"For now, we still keep him. I just wanted to warn you about that possibility beforehand and soon." Tom looked at Shizuo, worried. "What do you suggest we should do with him?"

"I don't know and I don't care!" Shizuo spat out, looking at the ground.

Tom raised his eyebrow. Since Izaya had come in the picture, Shizuo's actions used to contradict his words even more than before. Tom had hesitated upon whether he should order Shizuo to kill Izaya before he got too attached to him, but he had also hesitated way too long whether they would use him or not, and now he had missed the right timing. Izaya himself wasn't the problem; the problem would be Shizuo's reaction. After all, Tom knew that many men needed to do something to atone about their sins committed in the course of war and bloodshed.

"Okay. Let's leave that aside for now." He decided. "I need to talk to you about the next expedition. It's far away, so you'll leave the morning and return at night. It's programmed in about a week…"

In the other side of the camp, Izaya was happily chatting with Kadota, strolling next to him through the camp. Well, the happy one seemed to be Izaya. Kadota looked kind of uncomfortable, just like every time he had to talk to Izaya. He had warned Togusa and Yumasaki not to disclose too much information to him, ever. That must have started since Izaya began calling him Dota-chin and both of them started repeating it after him.

"Izaya, don't anger Shizuo way too much, you know." He couldn't help but advise him though, every time he saw them, for everyone's better interest. "Someday you're going to regret it if you keep it up."

"Eh? Is that so?" Izaya chirped in high spirits. He still hadn't forgiven Shizuo for his actions that night some days ago, but forgiveness wasn't really one of his strong points. In fact, he had never practiced it so far. Even though he was relieved that he didn't get fucked by another man, he couldn't deny that. "If Dota-chin is worried, then why isn't he taking me under his lovely wings?"

"No thanks." Kadota shot him down immediately. "You know how to take care of yourself." Izaya laughed because he expected nothing less from him. He knew very well that Kadota didn't want to have much to do with him, but that didn't prevent him from casually starting up some talk. After all, Kadota was kind enough to help him be able to communicate. "But this is what I mean, Izaya. Stop teasing him. Shizuo doesn't have much patience."

"I know very well what Shizu-chan has and what he has not." Izaya informed him. "I know him well enough."

"You only know him for about a month and a half. How can you say that?" Kadota stopped walking and Izaya turned and faced him.

"Oh? So, Dota-chin knows him better than I do?"

Kadota said nothing, and he just resumed walking, and Izaya imitated him, still looking at him and expecting his answer. "I cannot claim something like that." Kadota finally replied. "But I do know that Shizuo is dangerous when he loses it, and that he hates that. Shizuo has protected you up until now; don't push him to his limits."

"He doesn't protect me out of the goodness of his heart, and neither do you, Dota-chin." Izaya nonchalantly said. "Or will you try to tell me that both of you are kind people? After all, your society rejected you and now you're here." He looked at Kadota from the corner of his eye but the other man didn't seem fazed at all at the comment. "Shizu-chan didn't even want to talk about his family. I bet they long ago shunned their little monster, and he returned the favor. "

"No talking doesn't mean no loving." Kadota corrected him. "Shizuo loves his little brother very much. Too much I would even say. His family is a nice and loving family. He's no monster." Kadota narrowed his eyes. His patience was also reaching its limits.

"I'll talk however I want about the man I saw destroying homes and killing people like flies." Izaya snapped back, but his tone was rather casual. So, Shizu-chan had a little brother. Whom he loved a lot. Now that was just… incredibly marvelous. His evil smile had just started to resurface. "Dota-chin, I think it's time I should go. I have some chores to do. Next time we meet, let's talk about something more pleasant than Shizu-chan, okay?" He turned right and left Kadota alone, more worried than he ever had been before.

"This isn't going to go well…" He sighed at himself. Izaya's behavior was definitely looking for trouble, but he couldn't exactly blame him either. They were the intruders. They had no right to say anything good about themselves. Thinking that, he also left to search for his comrades.

Izaya, on the other hand, was now truly in high spirits, without having to pretend it. After Shizuo rejected him like that the other day, he felt both unbelievably relieved and unbelievably angry at the same time. Doing it with Shizuo would be so painful that he might even die. But on the other hand, had he survived, he would have had a way, possibly the only way, to lead someday Shizuo exactly where he wanted him too. Maybe even making him fall in love with him and manipulate him just as he wished. For someone as straightforward and as plain as him that would have been the best approach. But that had failed, and now Izaya needed to consider using the mention of his little brother. Maybe that could get him going… without Izaya having to sell his ass to him. Yes, that did sound better.

Speaking about selling his ass… Izaya noticed, far at the inside of where he was an also very familiar silhouette. Shazesh with his men were hanging out, gulping alcohol like it was water, making dirty jokes and laughing loudly and idiotically. Shazesh himself was sitting on an uprooted tree log with another guy while the rest of them were acting silly. Izaya approached them without standing out too much, and when they started singing and dancing and the guy sitting with Shazesh left and joined the rest, he snuck up on the other guy.

"I see you're having fun here." He mentioned, and watched in amusement as Shazesh almost drowned in his bottle of whiskey. The vile man turned around, coughing, making sure his eyes weren't deceiving him.

"Well, well, well, if it isn't Heiwajima's pretty toy!" He finally exclaimed, making Izaya's face slightly contort at the thought. "How come? You came to see us by your own?"

"I was just passing by." Izaya said, as he stepped over the log and sat next to Shazesh, like they were old friends. Some of Shazesh's men had noticed him and kept glancing, talking among them, but no one stepped towards both of them eventually. "I saw you and I thought I'd come and say hi. Didn't I do well?"

Shazesh laughed out loud, the kind of laughter that comes from your heart. "Of course, of course you did well!" He insisted. "Here, do you want a drink?" He offered him the whiskey bottle.

"Ah. No thanks. I'd love to, but Shizu-chan will know I was drinking." Izaya refused with a smile.

"Huh, he will now, won't he?" Shazesh brought the bottle on his lips gaudily. "Has he fucked you yet?"

"Who knows. Maybe." Izaya smirked, and didn't miss the bulge forming inside the other's pants.

"Ah, I'll have to test it out then. Quickly." Shazesh's lewd smile reached his ears, locking eyes with Izaya. "If he has, I'll bang you so badly I'll make you forget about that dick and worship only mine. And if he has not, I'm going to bang you so much and so hard that I'll shape your asshole into my dick's form!" His torso kept leaning over Izaya's side, as he kept talking, never breaking eye contact. Not fucking Izaya some days ago had actually made him unable to stop thinking about what he had delayed acquiring, making even more seductive than before. He had jerked off to Izaya's image almost every night since then. He just had to have him; he could barely restrain himself from grabbing Izaya and shoving his legs wide open right there, right then.

Izaya chuckled. "Let me guess; you were always this romantic?"

"Only with the right cunts." Shazesh replied, and laughed out loud again, leaning back in his place, away from Izaya. "It's too bad you're no chick though." He took another sip from his bottle. "I usually go for young chicks. When they're young, you know, about fifteen to twenty, they have grown meat in the right places, but the skin is still soft… and when you're the first you know it, from the blood. It's a marvelous sight!"

Izaya was stuck between admiring the complexity and difference in thinking in one of his humans, and pure and outmost disgust at what he was hearing. Though he had no intention of kidding himself; he knew important people of his own compatriots who were a lot worse. "Oh? Is that so? You must have been with many."

"Aye. But don't worry sweetheart!" Shazesh winked at him. "Something tells me you're going to be something really special!"

"Wow. Tell that something I'm flattered." Izaya commented.

Shazesh laughed a bit, and then just stopped and looked at Izaya. "You're a smart one, aren't you?"

"Now, I'm flattered even more." Izaya's smirk never left his face.

Shazesh burst in laughter. "Ah, you're a good one!" He stated. "Izaya, wasn't it? You're a really good one… I'm going to enjoy shoving my dick into your clever little mouth. Make sure you suck it well!"

"I must confess that it's not my area of expertise, but I'll do what I can." Izaya shrugged. Shazesh was way too easy to read. It was way too easy for Izaya to entertain him, if he just assured him that he'd open his legs for him. "If, of course, you can take care of a single hindrance, as we said."

Shazesh shot him a cunning look. "You, you came to ask about when and how, didn't you?" As Izaya said nothing, he continued: "Fine. I'll let you on our little secret. After all, we're going to me marvelous partners in this crime!"He said, as he took a metallic ball at the size of his palm out of his jacket's pocket. "You see this?" He showed Izaya. "The latest and most effective weapon in guerilla wars. This little guy here contains a powerful narcotic that can immobilize even an elephant. One of my boys sneaked in and stole it from the ship's most expensive cargo." He kept on bragging. Izaya wanted to ask about that ship, since he had never seen it, and couldn't even imagine it, but now he had more important things to learn. "Throw this at Heiwajima's feet; it releases gas that renders him unable to move a single muscle. The rest, is a piece of cake." Shazesh smiled and kept admiring the treasure in his hands, lost in thoughts about what he would do to Shizuo when he would catch him, how he would kick him, and stab him slowly in all the right places. "Heiwajima Shizuo in my mercy… maybe I'll fuck him, right there, too. Strength aside, he's a really good catch!"

Izaya had thought many times that he'd puke, since he arrived at that camp, but he had never before felt it so intensely. Shizuo? In this guy's hands? Shizuo? HIS Shizuo? "Shizuo Heiwajima is someone that must be dealt him as quickly as possible." He blurted out, unable to restrain himself. "If you feel it's safe, play with him. But I'd suggest you get it done soon. After all, beasts can be unpredictable."

"Aw, you're so cute when you worry!" Shazesh exclaimed and threw his arm around Izaya's shoulders, sticking too close for comfort to him. "But you don't need to. The next expedition is in one week. All you need to do is tell us where exactly we can find him all alone and defenseless when he returns… and toy with his weapons a bit… if you know what I mean!"

"Shizuo doesn't need weapons. It's his temper you need to be wary of." Izaya smirked. "I'll tell you exactly the ideal time and the place to find him. The rest is up to you."

"Hehe, and then we will have some fun, won't we?" He said, as he grabbed Izaya's thigh, a move he was set up on doing for some time by then.

"Shazesh." Izaya's serious tone made him halt his impulsive and cheerful behavior. He looked up at him. "What's the most fun you're having here?"

Shazesh just kept looking Izaya in the eyes for some moments, until he slowly backed away and removed his hand from the other's thigh. "When the light goes off of their eyes the moment I finish inside of them. It's the most exciting look anyone can witness. When they die as they get fucked."

Izaya felt all of the hairs on his body standing up, after hearing that statement. "That's my fate too, Shazesh?" He sincerely asked of him.

"Ah, no." He answered, hurryingly. "That's what I love to do to women. Men, I don't care. Some are good fucks. But I don't really care about them."

"How come?" That instantly picked Izaya's interest. "Did you stumble over some bad women back home?"

"Aye. And I showed her good!" Usually, Shazesh was emitting an aura of sadism, but now, Izaya didn't miss the thick vale of hatred that befell on his eyes as he uttered those words, obviously recalling memories.

"Well, women are indeed mysterious creatures, that's for sure." Izaya said, as he stood up, ready to leave. "They might have come into this world to make the lives of men miserable."

"No." Shazesh corrected him, staying where he was. "They came into this world to make men happy. As did cows, chickens, and pigs. Their meat makes men happy." He said, offering his signature lewd smile once again.

"That's an interesting opinion." Izaya nodded. "Next time, I'll come with the information you need. I hope we work things out nicely."

"See you around, cutie." Shazesh nodded back and took another sip from his bottle as Izaya turned and left him and his group.

Izaya maintained his usual pacing for as far as they could see him, but, as soon as he lost sight of them, he started walking away as more quickly as he could. It had already started to grow dark as the sun had already set, and he didn't want to be left alone in the camp at night, plus, Shizuo would start questioning him about where he had been if he arrived later than him in the tent. And that was something he'd prefer to avoid.

He arrived right outside their time at the same time Shizuo did. They looked at each other for a couple of moments.

"Where have you been?" Shizuo asked.

"Here and there." Izaya shrugged and walked inside the tent, in front of Shizuo. As it seemed, he wouldn't be able to avoid it after all.

"Where here and where there!" Shizuo demanded to know. "You sure know how to walk around like you own the place now! You're not one of us, you know! What will you do if someone attacks you?"

"I'll call your name, my prince!" Izaya mocked him, as he sat down on the ground. "Then you'll surely rush to my rescue!"

"Don't bet on it…" Shizuo said and the fact that his tone wasn't irritated but deadpan, didn't escape Izaya's attention.

"What is it, Shizu-chan? You really won't come?" He said, half jokingly, half seriously.

"Not if you're the one starting up the trouble."

"Now you're hurting me!" Izaya gasped pretentiously, already getting on Shizuo's nerves. "You know I would never do that!"

"I know shit!" Shizuo replied angrily. But then he remembered what Tom had given him as an extra and his anger faded away. "Come on, I have something to give you." He said, as he sat in front of Izaya, squatting, taking the pouch he was usually carrying off of his shoulders and bringing it in front of them both.

Izaya's eyes widened, in honest surprise. "Give? To… me?"

"Yes, to you." Shizuo casually said, as he took a metallic bottle, the one Izaya knew as the one they used to keep liquids warm. "Pass me your cup."

Izaya did as instructed, and he silently watched as Shizuo poured a dark, brown drink from the bottle in it. What could that be? He had never seen it before. Everyone was always drinking from canteens so one could never be sure what the other was drinking.

"Here." Shizuo gave it to him, the cup filled with it. "It's coffee. It's a drink. It's bitter and I don't like it, so I never drink it, but Commander Tom had just gotten some ready and I thought you'd like to try it…"

Izaya was left speechless. He slowly took the cup, and then, at the same pace, tried a sip. And the taste that hit him was simply, purely amazing.

"This…" He said. "This is delicious! This is good, Shizu-chan!" He exclaimed, as he tried it again, more enthusiastically than before. He almost looked like a kid in Shizuo's eyes for a second.

"Hey, don't drink it like it's water!" Shizuo chastised him, but he seemed a bit amused, as he lit up a cigarette that hanged by his mouth. "It has a substance that won't allow you to sleep if you drink too much of it!"

"That's fine; I'll just stare at Shizu-chan's handsome face all night." He retorted, and drank some again.

"Don't say such creepy things." Shizuo's right eyebrow twitched.

"You're the one holding me tightly in your arms at night… every night." Izaya reminded him.

"Only because I can't let you run away!"

"See? You're admitting it yourself!" Izaya happily announced. As Shizuo opened his mouth to throw an answer at him, Izaya cut him short: "Don't worry Shizu-chan. I'm not going to run away. I'm not stupid." He said, drinking from his cup again. "Even if you were to throw me out, I'd return right here again. You are the future. Anyone can see that."

"Don't you feel anything about your country crumbling to bits?" Shizuo asked him.

For Izaya, it wasn't just a country. It was his entire world. "This and that are irrelevant." He said, looking down at the brown liquid, which was staring right back at him. "Really, Shizu-chan, I meant to ask you…"

"Huh? What?" Shizuo puffed out some smoke.

"What do you think about women?"

Now, talk about something beside the mark. "What? Where did that come from? No, what do you even mean?" Shizuo even wondered it out loud.

"Like… do you think that women came into this world to make men miserable? Or to make them happy?" He looked up at Shizuo and expected his answer.

"…why would you think that women came in this world for the sake of men in the first place. That's what you actually think? I don't believe so." What the hell was he asking, Shizuo thought, and still couldn't figure it out.

"I just want to know what you think."

"What I think… What is there to think? We're all humans." He simply stated. "Even if some things are different, we all have the same hearts and the same brains." He concluded. "I can't understand why you would ask this kind of question."

"'The same hearts and the same brains'… wasn't it?" Izaya smiled a bit. "Shizu-chan's definition is definitely interesting…" He chuckled a bit.

It was weird. Even though Shizuo and he were polar opposites, making conflict unavoidable, they just happened to agree at the most important stuff. Izaya had observed humans long enough to be able to tell that women were equally interesting and variable as men were. Their general pattern of behavior might differ than the one of men due to their distance in the social scale, but they were just as much of human beings as their male counterparts. And thus, it was twice as amusing to see them struggle under the men's feet. Not literally though. As Izaya had recently discovered, it wasn't fun when it happened literally at all. He remembered his sisters and Namie and unconsciously, gripped the cup more tightly.

"Don't worry about your sisters…"Shizuo said, and Izaya jerked up, almost offended that Shizuo seemed to have read his thoughts. "If they are half as smart as you are, they'll be okay."

"Wow, Shizu-chan actually complimented me! Hooray!" Izaya's sarcasm was dripping. "Yet, look where I am, Shizu-chan, here with you."

"You could have been with someone worse." Shizuo actually smiled a bit.

"That… might be true." Izaya agreed, and took a sip from his coffee, which had started to grow cold and wasn't as tasty as before. "That might be true."

"I don't have the right to be sorry for what you had to endure." Shizuo confessed to him, leaving Izaya once again speechless. "We have our respective roles to play in this shitty world. We must act accordingly."

"We both chose those roles, didn't we?" Izaya commented, as he shrugged.

"Yes we did." Shizuo agreed. "And we have to see them through the end."

Izaya chuckled bitterly. "But my end seems so much closer than Shizu-chan's, it's so unfair…" He said, his gaze dropping at the ground, filled with many grim thoughts. "Whatever. In the end we're all alone either way. No matter when it comes."

"Ah… I don't like thinking like that." Shizuo said, lighting up another cigarette, as his previous one had just finished. "And I don't even believe that this is true for everyone. You'll never alone as long as you have people who love you."

"Like your little brother, Shizu-chan?"

Izaya momentarily thought that it would have been better if he had stepped on a landmine. Shizuo's entire form went from relaxed to rigid in mere milliseconds, and the look in his eyes alone was enough to kill a horde of wolves. "Never." He said through gritted teeth that would barely move away from each other, cutting the freshly lit up cigarette and letting it drop on the ground, barely allowing the voice to come out. "Never. Again. Will I hear you. Mentioning my little brother with that mouth of yours. You heard me? EVER!" His voice was so downright menacing that Izaya got a bit scared, he had to confess. "If you ever do it again, I'll rip your tongue right off your mouth and break it into tiny pieces! Understand?"

Izaya nodded numbly, the knuckles around the cup with the coffee turning white. That right now, had been a mistake, under the current circumstances. He felt the need to say something to defend himself, but Shizuo's killer look instructed him otherwise. "Understand." He just said, just like before, when that was one of the less than a few words he knew. "Understand."

Now all that was left to be moved was a single, last piece.

As Shizuo was turning around and lighting up a third cigarette, in order to calm himself down, Izaya reminded himself that he had to go and see a very particular doctor some time soon.

It would be an optional piece, but it would make the game more interesting, letting it last longer.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

As the week passed by, the camp was going through a very hectic phase. It was time for them to move further inside the land, as their respective teams, that arrived a little bit later than them, had already made significant progress. Izaya didn't know exactly how many they were, but he guessed that there were enough to cover the most south part of Sekai, hugging the coastline, and then move upwards to complete the conquest. They were divided in camps of five hundred people so Izaya could easily do a rough estimation of how many they were in total, which probably amounted to a sum of ten to fifteen thousand people. Ten thousand people setting off to conquer millions did seem like a ridiculously impossible task, even with their superior technology, but Izaya doubted that they would remain only ten thousand for much longer. He had never seen anyone from other platoons, but he knew that they were communicating through devices that allowed their voices to travel to distant places. And that was the way they learned about each other's course.

Also, Izaya had correctly assumed that they already knew the basic topography of all of the land through equally convenient and suitable devices. Meaning, that after the upcoming expedition, they would already be able to move safely further inside the mainland. They had already stayed in one place longer than necessary. The other platoons could leave them behind and that could end up being a serious drawback. So, everyone was running up and down in frenzy, trying to prepare for the expedition and the movement in the same time.

That gave Izaya more than enough time to explore further some things he wanted, and also meet with Shazesh in secret when he needed. He told him everything about the route Shizuo was going to take, and even informed him that the mention of Shizuo's little brother was a perfect bait. Those meetings would have been less stressful if Shazesh hadn't tried to grab his ass each time.

As he stepped inside the tent they were using as infirmary, he couldn't help but notice that not a single soldier had ever been injured, aside the one Shizuo had beaten into a pulp. Izaya stole some glances at the battered up body of the unfortunate man, who was now in a deep slumber, due to the medication he was taking. But it was another man he was looking for.

"Do you need something?"

Izaya turned around to meet Dr Lynch's grim face. He had seen faces like his many times before. It was the face of a man who has nothing left to lose so he is willing to cling even from the most slender string that appears before him. It was one of Izaya's favorite faces.

"Ah. Pardon my intrusion!" Izaya smiled, and took a small step behind. "It's just so hectic out there… Shizu-chan shooed me away, he said he had to do things and my existence bothered him! But I guess that applies to all of you and your general goal here, doesn't it?"

"Go home… I mean, get back." The doctor muttered, as he strolled past Izaya, shaking his head, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

"Why, doctor? I thought I wanted to speak a bit with you." Izaya casually mentioned. "Am I a bother to you too?"

Lynch didn't reply for a few seconds, instead he sat down, in a small ottoman chair in the corner. It left a grand impression on Izaya that he wouldn't dare to lift his gaze from the ground. "Get back…" He finally said when he opened his mouth. "If you don't, he might hurt you."

"Oh? Can he do more to me than he already has?" Izaya let out a deep and sensual voice, watching in amusement as the other man instantly covered his ears and started trembling. He was an emotionally weak man. And more than that, he must have been kind. "Do you feel sorry for me, Doctor?" He asked, as he started walking forward, towards him.

"Get back, please…!" Lynch begged him, clutching onto the sides of his head for dear life. "Get back, I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do for you, or for anyone like you! I can't help you, I can't save you, so please, don't… don't…"

"Stand in front of you? Remind you that I exist?" Izaya's tone was far more mellow that the severity including in his words, as he came and stood right in front of Lynch, essentially looking down at the sitting wreck of a man. "Lift your head up, Doctor. Lift it up and look at me."

Lynch shook his head again, like a stubborn child. He tried to say something but only a choked sound came out. Izaya didn't give up though.

"Lift your head up and look at me in the eyes, Doctor." He repeated, in a more severe tone this time. Lynch obeyed this time, looking at Izaya with eyes full of regret, depression, sadness and pain. A conscientious doctor. What hell must it have been for him to be there. "You can save me, doctor." He told him, and stared at those gray eyes and puffed red from all the guilt, as they widened in unexpected hope. "You can save me, just with a few words."

A bit later, at the other side of the camp, Shizuo had really started regretting kicking Izaya out, even if it was just temporary. Aside from the fact that he worried about what Izaya was doing and mostly with whom, it was really irritating and troublesome to start gathering up all the necessary things in the necessary order in the necessary way in the necessary- fuck everything. He wasn't using Izaya for sex, at least he could use him as a maid, butler, whatever. The reason he didn't was because he absolutely despised other people touching his stuff. Like that point hadn't already come across, he thought, as he just stared in front of his tent.

"Hey, Shizuo." Kadota's voice shook him off of his thoughts, and made him turn around to face the other guy. "Getting ready for departure?" He asked, as he pointed at the tent.

"Kind of… Pisses me the hell off." Shizuo ruffled his hair. "Are you guys done?"

"Togusa and Yumasaki were working on it all day so any moment now."

"Hmm? And what's Izaya doing, watching you, bubbling next to your ears and annoying you? How do you put up with him." Shizuo couldn't resist commenting.

"Eh?" Kadota asked, with an expression of genuine wonder, not sure what Shizuo meant. "He's passing by from time to time, he's not that unpleasant… I sincerely wished he'd stopped calling me Dota-chin, though. The others have caught up on it and I just can't find peace…"

"Yeah, he pulls shit like that." Shizuo's anger was starting to steadily resurface. Something tugged at his chest. He couldn't understand the reason though. "That fucking bastard!" Shizuo said as he kneeled down to grab one of his large riffles.

"So? Where is he now?" Kadota casually asked.

Shizuo froze. "What do you mean? Wasn't he with you guys just now?"

"What? With us?" Kadota was taken aback. "No, today he didn't come by our place at all."

As Shizuo was standing up, holding the riffle, he did a violent and sudden movement and snapped it in two, crashing it upon his knee. Kadota vaguely thought that this would count as a severe damage in equipment, before considering running for his dear life. "Then where is heeeeeee?" He growled like a lion, as he turned and darted his eyes on Kadota, who, no matter how brave he was, he was unprotected in front of Shizuo's bare rage. "WHERE IS HE?"He roared, like it was Kadota's responsibility to know that. Kadota didn't even know where to start from to calm him down.

"S-Shizu-chan?"

Izaya couldn't help but stutter, despite himself. He had just reached the place, and he knew very well that this kind of anger was directed towards him and not Kadota. As soon as Shizuo's eyes caught him, they gleamed, and Shizuo instantly started taking large steps towards where Izaya was standing.

Another feeling Izaya was experiencing for the first time in that camp, was not only the feeling of helplessness, it was the entrapment. You wanted to run for your life but there simply wasn't any place you could go. His legs were ordering him to run, run the hell out of there, his life was depending on it, but his brain knew very well that if he did that, the consequences would be even worse. Far worse. But as he saw Shizuo stomping towards him, like he was out for blood, coming onto him like a frenzied beast, he couldn't help it. He took two steps backwards.

He knew it was a mistake the moment he did it. He didn't need to hear Shizuo roar: "DON'T YOU DARE TO RUN AWAY FROM ME!" As he finally lashed at him. Izaya barely managed to shield his face with both of his arms, to be later quite surprised by the fact that Shizuo just grabbed them instead of trying to punch through them.

"I-I wasn't trying to…"

"SHUT UP!" Shizuo violently shook him, shoving Izaya's arms away from his face. Kadota wanted to stop Shizuo but he wouldn't dare to interfere. "Shut up, don't you fucking talk back to me!"

"Please calm down, what did I do?" Izaya's tone was just the tiniest bit desperate. He knew that he was in for a lot of pain, and if Shizuo had happened to come to know certain things, he was in for a very violent and ugly death. "What did I do?" He had to know what he was being accused of.

That made Shizuo pause for some moments, suddenly realizing that Izaya hadn't done something he hadn't done before. He also realized that he was always assuming, when Izaya was leaving, that he was with Kadota, namely with someone Shizuo trusted. But there was no guarantee for that. "Where have you been?" He asked, seemingly calmer than before.

"I was just walking around. Why? What happened?" As Shizuo remained silent, Izaya turned to Kadota. "Dota-chin? Did something happen?"

Suddenly, the hand around his tightened so much it brought forth almost unbearable pain. He cried out, as Shizuo, dragged him towards their tent. They would have gotten in, if Kadota hadn't stepped forward.

Shizuo looked at him, this close to snap. "Move it, Kadota."

Kadota shot him one of those looks of his, the one that was both disappointed and condescending at the same time. "You're too violent, Shizuo. Especially with him." He motioned towards Izaya. "He didn't do anything. Let him go."

"Are you fucking ordering me around?" Shizuo snarled. "Move before I remove you!"

"I know how much you hate violence, Shizuo!" Kadota bravely stood his ground. After all, he wasn't doing any of this because he wanted to help Izaya. Sure, him too, but the first one he wanted to help, was Shizuo. "What the hell happened?"

That was a question Shizuo didn't know how to answer. He didn't know what had happened. Izaya's face, voice, manners, his insults, his seductiveness, and even his absence, all of them were playing with Shizuo's nerves, pushing him to his limits. Just about everything in him were lighting up a fire that refused to burn out.

At the same moment that he loosened up his hold on Izaya, he heard him speak: "Ah, Dota-chin, it's really kind of you to worry about us, but really, there is no reason for it." He said as he stepped forward, with Shizuo still grabbing him above the wrist. "If there's a problem, we'll solve it ourselves. And Shizu-chan is not as violent as you would think. That, I can assure you."

"Shut up you." Shizuo murmured and finally shoved Izaya inside the tent, as Kadota was left with no other choice than to step aside. He then just looked at Kadota, who returned the look, and without saying anything, he stepped inside as well. He could barely hear Kadota sigh and then quietly walking away.

"Seriously, Shizu-chan, what is it? If you're being this possessive, you won't be popular with the girls." Izaya commented, and then casually stepped aside and avoided the punch coming at him. "I mean," he continued, "everyone digs a little bit of jealousy from time to time, but in your case it has a heavy cost!"

"Do you think I want to care about where you are and what you're doing with whom?" Shizuo spat out. "You are my fucking responsibility until God damn knows when! I won't have you running around anymore!"

"Shizu-chan, you kept me to speak your language and if I had stayed here with you all day, honestly, all I'd know by now would still be 'understand'."

"And it would have been perfect!"

"Well, then, do it!" Izaya finally snapped, stomping towards Shizuo like Shizuo had previously did to him, locking eyes with him, his suddenly filled with malice. "Do it, get it over with! Rape me, kill me, get this fucking farce over with! Negotiations? Do you monsters really need negotiations? I'm not needed anyway, so you might as well get it over with me, since I annoy you so much, like the fucking beast you are!"

With every single one of Izaya's words, Shizuo felt himself slipping further into the darkness. The walls of the tent were shrinking around him, drowning him, making it hard for him to breathe. All he felt was an irresistible urge to destroy everything that surrounded him, Izaya included. He hated himself for as long as he could remember, and taking Izaya in had only served to make things worse. And the worst part was that he knew and yet, he couldn't restrain himself. If he did as told, Izaya would win, but Shizuo had no way to prevent himself for succumbing to violence. No, it looked like they would both lose. And this was probably the way it would end for both of them.

Izaya noticed the way Shizuo's eyes were filled with void and he immediately regretted his words. The moment Shizuo lifted his hand up to strike, he delved his hand into the sleeve of his yukata, grabbing tightly his well hidden knife, but without taking it out.

Maybe God felt sorry for them and he decided to interfere at that moment.

"Shizuo! What are you doing? We need you to organize the first line!" A slightly annoyed Tom said, as he walked inside the tent. He noticed how both of them were standing, but their fights never were something new for anyone. "Come on, we're going to leave as soon as the night falls, we're already back on schedule!"

Those simple words instantly brought Shizuo back in his senses. He realized in terror that he was about to destroy the person in front of him, provoked only by words they used to throw at each other daily. "I'll be right there, Commander Tom." He said, as he lowered his hand. "Just give me a couple of minutes; I'll be right behind you."

"Okay, I'll be waiting, but try to make it short." With those words, Tom left as quickly as he had come. Shizuo thanked him from the bottom of his heart, for the mere reason that this person existed.

Shizuo looked at Izaya again, this time completely composed. "I'm going to leave now." He announced. "I don't know when I'll be back. Probably near dawn. Don't leave the tent… and keep the knife."

Izaya was taken aback. Shizuo had noticed and yet he hadn't said anything until then. He wasn't even angry. "How do you know it's a knife? It could be small gun."

"I just thought a knife would suit you better… whatever." Shizuo said, as he turned to leave. "Just hold on to it, in any case."

"Shizuo."

Shizuo turned back again to look at him. When Izaya was calling him by his normal name, it meant that he had something important to say. "What?"

"You don't need me, but I need you."

If there was something Shizuo could say for certain, it was that he knew Izaya's eyes. When he was teasing, when he hid something, when he was serious. "I know." He just said, and then finally left.

His head was a mess.

He didn't know what Izaya was thinking. He didn't know what he wanted to do with him. He didn't know how he felt about him. The only definite thing was that he was psychologically wearing him out all day, and then soothing him when they slept next to each other at night, just by being there. That was the only time they were never arguing, they were both just shutting up, as they felt natural and comfortable.

Shizuo's was still contemplating Izaya's last words, as he lit up another one of his cigarettes, not paying much attention to the people running up and down in preparations for the upcoming battle. When they finally marched forward, it was already evening. All this time, Shizuo just wondered if those words were Izaya's way to tell him to take care, but he still doubted it. Firstly, there was next to zero possibility of anything seriously harm to befall him. Secondly, Izaya hated his guts. Thirdly, he had just tried to kill him.

He didn't know what bugged him so much. Something had stricken a nerve even before Izaya showed up, but he couldn't exactly place what it was. And even without taking that into account, his gut was just giving out a very bad premonition. Something would happen, but he didn't know when or where.

When they attacked the last village in their agenda, Shizuo stayed behind, deciding not to interfere until the right time, to give the final blow. That was what he always did, a usual tactic Tom used, but always, someone would appear that would make Shizuo lose his nerve much more quickly and go on that destructive spree he despised so much. He was certain that it would happen again, but he wanted to contain it for as long as it was possible. He had almost already done it just a few hours ago, and he was this close to find himself without someone waiting for him back home.

Then it dawned on him. He had someone waiting for him to come back. He had someone that was asking for him. He had someone that needed him. Even if everything was forced upon them, that fact remained. He had someone he had to protect, no matter how much they might despise each other. Wasn't that… wasn't that something that no one else had, in this fucked up world of theirs? Wasn't it something good? Because it felt good. Every time he would come back and Izaya was waiting for him, seeing him always felt good. No matter the fights, the insults, or…

An arrow ripped the air and was darted right beside his head, piercing the bole of a nearby tree. Patience time was officially over for Shizuo, as he roared and threw himself into battle, earlier than expected as always.

When everything was over and they started getting back, he was twice as tired as he usually was. By then, the natives had already realized the danger those green people were posing, and they were often finding many abandoned villages, to see those people later on, gathered together, barricaded and trying to put up a fight, always in vain as it seemed. But as a result, the fights were much longer than before, and twice as tiring. Shizuo had also lost sight of Tom and Kadota. He didn't worry about their safety, but he didn't quite fancy getting back on his own. It felt lonelier than it should.

Most of the soldiers had already caught women like they always did, but now they would start to keep some, so everybody had gone in different places and Shizuo was essentially literally left all alone, just outside the camp. He always had to walk alone at that area anyway, because no one would ever go straight to the tents, especially at the outer side of the camp, but now it seemed even emptier.

He was only fifty steps away from the first tents when he noticed something getting dropped at his feet. He frowned, as he looked down, perplexed and annoyed. His eyes widened as he realized what it was, but he didn't have the time to do much else. The grenade popped open, releasing a thick gas of a deep purple color, which hit Shizuo straight in the face. In his surprise, he inhaled, getting a good dose out of it. Immediately, his limbs were suddenly weighing seven tones each, and he crashed face down onto the ground, unable to move even his little finger.

Shizuo just stayed where he fell for a couple of minutes, not as much in shock as trying to discern what has just happened. When he found himself unable to move, he let out a pained growl, as he was trying so hard but failing to gain control of his body. He could clearly hear and see though, and he didn't miss the snickers coming from all around him.

His field of vision was limited from his fell down position, but he did see some of his fellow soldiers gathering up all around him, wearing their green military clothes and protective masks around their heads.

"Take them off now; the air has cleared up." Their leader said, as he took off his own mask, revealing his face, upon which was plastered a dirty grin.

Shizuo's eyes widened in realization, and then narrowed in absolute wrath. "Shaaaaaaazeeeesh…!" He needed to muster all of his strength just to utter the other's name. "What… doing… bastard…"

"Hey, guys, look at him!" Shazesh's voice undoubtedly had a triumphant tone, as his lackeys started laughing out loud now. "Look at him! The great Heiwajima Shizuo! All it took to defeat him was just some paralyzing gas! Who's laughing NOW?" He spat onto the ground, and walked without hesitation right in front of Shizuo's head. "Who's laughing now, hmm?"

"Fucking… bastard!" Shizuo struggled to say, and he didn't cry out when Shazesh kneeled down, grabbed him by the hair and lifted his head up, close to his. His teeth were clenched and his eyes were shut, but no voice escaped his mouth.

"You messed with one of my bros, and this is what you got for it!" Shazesh's voice sounded more than venomous and dangerous, as Shizuo shot him an enraged look. "Well, this and… I never really liked you, you know?" More laughter escaped his followers, as Shazesh's face twisted in a sadistic expression. "You should be grateful, Heiwajima. I never liked you, and yet, I'm going to take such good care of you!" He said, as he took a knife out of its sheath and licked it, so close to Shizuo's face that he could see his facial muscles churning in disgust. "Grab him, boys!"

Getting more than enough reassured for what had just transpired, Shazesh's men didn't waste any time. One grabbed him by the leg, another from the arm, and others followed to assist them. Shizuo suddenly found himself in a nightmarish swirl of hands pulling at his clothes and grabbing his body, thing that only served to get him more furious than he already was. With his wrath blinding him, his body moved without too much thought of how impossible it was. He kicked someone away, shoved away someone else, fought as hard as he could without stopping to spare a second thought of how bad the situation was.

"Shazesh! Shazesh, he can move!" One of his men screamed, terrified, reminded of what had happened to their friend back then.

"Don't panic! He got a good dose; he can't move that much. Stab him!" Their leader said and he lowered the knife with force, digging it right into Shizuo's right shoulder. Shizuo cried out in agony, giving Shazesh an even more beastly look than before. "Stab him! Nowhere vital yet, but stab him!" Shazesh repeated his order, and his men didn't hesitate for a second time to follow it.

Shizuo didn't normally feel much pain. All he felt was his body growing heavier by the second. When he realized that half a dozen of people had started burying their knives maniacally inside the flesh of his arms and legs, and when the ground around him was painted red, it was the first time that a pang of fear shot through him. He might actually die there. As he stopped resisting, and his vision started getting clouded, he vaguely remembered Izaya. Had the same thing happened to him? Would it? Would he be unable to protect him? The thought of death was scary, it was scarier than he had thought...

"Stop, enough." Shazesh ordered, sweat running down his temples from the intense exercise. "Turn him around. It's time for the main event, and I need a clear look of his face for that."

As Shizuo felt hands rolling him on his back, he did a last desperate try to get his eyes to focus somewhere. He felt some hands holding him down, while others were pulling his legs apart, and suddenly, he saw Shazesh hovering over him. The realization struck him and made it easier for him to regain his senses, as his mind cleared up in a terrifying speed. "Get… off…" He managed, anger boiling inside him once again.

"No darling, I'm not getting off. I said I'm going to take good care of you, didn't I?" Shazesh shook gaudily the knife he was holding. "Lay back, my dear Shizuo. Uncle Shazesh is going to make you feel reeeeeeal good right now!" He said, as he licked his lips, and lowered slowly the knife, delving it beneath Shizuo's leather waistband and ripping it apart viciously with a swift movement.

Shizuo couldn't help but let out a desperate, furious scream, when he felt hands working on the zipper of his pants. His whole body was rejecting the hands that caught him but there they were, still violating his wishes. No matter how much it shook to throw them off, it was futile.

"Yes, scream! Come on, scream some more! Scream!" Shazesh's entire body was trembling too, but in excitement, as he was currently experiencing the most intense hard on he ever had. "Fight more! Come on! Resist, you bitch! Fight me! You can't!" He said, as he lifted up his knife once again, ready to tear Shizuo's clothes completely. "You CA-"

"STOP IT RIGHT THERE!"

Everything froze. Shazesh remained unmoving for some seconds, until he finally lifted his head up, to see Kadota, only some feet away, aiming at him with a rifle.

In sheer disbelief, he looked around. Togusa, Yumasaki, and many others, were pointing guns at them, too close to miss. He looked in front again, and he saw their Commander, Tom, slowly walking towards them, wearing an unforgiving expression of sheer disappointment.

"It's over." Tom said, so coldly that the temperature might have actually dropped. "Put your knives down and stand up. Get away from him. I won't repeat myself."

Shazesh was just left there, looking at him, without moving a muscle.

It was over?

No.

It was FAR from over!


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

"I told you I won't repeat myself!" Tom's voice was turning even more menacing by the second. "What are you waiting for?"

Shazesh's men were so petrified that they barely managed to move their heads towards their leader, expecting the crucial reaction out of him. All of them could easily understand how extremely bad their position was, and talking their way out of it didn't seem like a possible choice. So they hung onto their leader for dear life, as they didn't have any clue which way they should react in order not to worsen their already catastrophic position. One of them tried talking: "Sha-"

"DON'T YOU FUCKING MOVE!" Shazesh himself roared, as he grabbed Shizuo by the hair and stuck the knife close to the skin of his neck, so close that he slightly cut him and blood ran out. "NOBODY MOVES, OR I'LL FUCKING CUT HIM LIKE A PIG! GOT IT?"

Nobody moved or said anything indeed, but it was clear inside Tom's narrowed eyes that his patience was running thin.

"Sha-Shazesh, maybe we should just… I mean, what do you hope to gain from this? What are we supposed to do?" One of his men stuttered, trying to interfere.

"SHUT UP! Put your tiny, nonexistent brains to work for once, just for once, you goddamn, fucking, stupid idiots!" Shazesh spat at them, his composure already gone. "What do you think is going to happen if we give ourselves up, huh? Undergo a fucking trial? Here? Do you even know where you are?" The desperation in his voice was well masked under his infuriation. "They'll shoot us in cold blood! That's what they are going to do!"

"Then we would just have shot you without warning you to stop." Tom informed him, as coldly as before. "Don't make me regret that decision now. I'm going to tell you for the last time-"

"Aye, Commander, sure. You've got your position to think about. But to us, those fake politics don't mean shit!" Shazesh said, as he grabbed Shizuo by the collar and lifted him up, as much as he could, because Shizuo had apparently lost too much blood to be able to stand on his own feet. Then, without ever removing the knife from his neck, he used his left arm and his left leg to support Shizuo's weight. It was like an absurd and horrid hug.

Tom's heart tightened as he watched his friend's body soaked in its own blood, barely containing his consciousness. His limbs in particular were wounded terribly. Seeing Shizuo like this, with someone else's knife on his neck, reminded him that Shizuo was indeed a human being. Strangely, Tom didn't like that. He didn't like seeing Shizuo weak.

Before he could say anything, Shazesh got to him: "So? My dear Commander? Do you want to know if your bullets are faster than my knife on his neck? You're welcome to try, but you know, my body MIGHT make an abrupt movement, you never know! Well?"

As Tom didn't do or say anything, Shazesh was frantically trying to look for some way to escape. Tom wouldn't listen to an order of lowering their guns. He couldn't due to his position as Commander. And it would be way too risky to order his men to pull their own guns out. On top of all that, more people had started gathering around, curious and then scandalized about the crisis that had occurred, forgetting even their women. He had to stall some more time, though he didn't know what to wait for.

"So, you won't move huh?" Shazesh finally decided to lay all of his cards down. "Of course you wouldn't! You wouldn't risk for that dear friend of yours! So dear, that you even covered for him when he beat up OUR pal! But you'd be willing to point your guns us, who are only serving justice!"

"Shizuo was acting in the line of his duty when he attacked your 'pal'!" Tom raised his voice, enraged but still maintaining his composure. "I ordered him to protect a certain man; your 'pal', and all of you, were about to harm the object of that order, so he acted! Enlighten me, how is this, the same as premeditated rape and murder, as well as theft of vital supplies?"

Then it dawned on Shazesh. There was also someone else in this game. "Well, then, you could always bring me that object, and everything would be peaceful and even again!" His face gleamed. "Go on! Bring him!" As Tom wasn't moving, he changed the tone: "BRING HIM, I said!" He roared, burying the knife deeper into Shizuo's neck and drawing out more blood. "Bring me that whore of his you so generously gave him! Bring me Izaya!"

Before Tom could harshly reply, he felt a hand grabbing momentarily his arm, softly and reassuringly.

"And I thought I heard my name."

Tom simply watched as the black haired man, clothed in those black robes, walked past him and headed slowly but confidently forward. He couldn't exactly place what he was reminding him of, not right at that moment.

"Good thing you said the name Izaya of course, but I had a feeling it was about me since the 'whore' pronunciation, to be frank." Izaya nonchalantly commented. "So?" He turned at Shazesh.

He didn't have to talk loudly for Shazesh to understand what he wanted to say. Shazesh was certain that Izaya was blaming him for the failure, and looking like a failure to Izaya's eyes, was more depressing and humiliating than he had ever thought. "You're coming with us!"

"Really?" Izaya chuckled. "And where exactly do you plan on going?" He said, as he folded his arms across his chest.

"Somewhere that I can drop you on all fours, and fuck you like a bitch, dreaming that I'm fucking his cute little brother!" He said, as his grip on Shizuo tightened even more.

It didn't need much more.

Suddenly, Shazesh felt the hand that was holding the knife to Shizuo's neck being seized, effectively immobilized. He could only watch in a few moments of terror, as Shizuo opened his eyes and glared bloody death at him, literally also baring his fangs. In the next moments, Shizuo's legs had a firm hold of the ground, as he got up and with one swift movement, threw Shazesh's body on top of some of his men, like it belonged to a ragdoll.

The image of the bloody, tortured and drugged Shizuo, managing to stand up and displaying such an overwhelming form of violence, like a beast that had climbed its way straight from the depths of hell, would forever be engraved in the memories of everyone who saw him that day. Izaya felt again that shiver running through his spine, as he couldn't take his eyes off of Shizuo, yet again. He was admiring how much non-human his reactions, no, his entire nature was. Shazesh's reactions were much more humane. But Shizuo was way out of everybody else's league, thing that Izaya already knew and hated from the bottom of his heart.

Humans are interesting. Humans are loveable.

Animals are not. And they can't be this beautiful.

Monsters can't be this beautiful.

The moment, however, was short lived, as that very image was a step more terrifying than anything even soldiers like them ever had to face. Seeing their boss thrown in the air, two of his men couldn't restrain themselves. They screamed in utter terror and desperation, as they pulled out their guns and pointed them at Shizuo.

"MORONS!" Shazesh managed to shoot himself up from his landing position in a matter of milliseconds, when he saw what they had just done, and tried to start running towards them. "STO-"

"FIRE!"

Tom didn't have to repeat this order. The same moment it rained bullets mercilessly on that half dozen of men, without any of them managing to pull the trigger at Shizuo, needless to say about defending themselves. Shazesh's body took the most damage and it shook violently before finally falling face down unceremoniously, having sustained injuries from so many bullets that he was beyond any hope of salvation.

When every single one of them fell, everything suddenly got quiet. For some moments, nobody dared to move, until Shizuo, barely registering that the immediate danger was over, let his body give itself up in exhaustion and fell down as well.

"Shizuo!" Kadota yelled and ran towards him, with many others following his example. Izaya observed them with a slight interest but casually walked past them. He had something a bit more interesting to see.

Most of Shazesh's men were already dead. Some soldiers had started giving them the final headshots, in order to either ensure they were dead, or spare them the torture of a slow death. But Izaya was interested in only one.

And as expected, the worst dogs always die last.

Shazesh was barely clinging to life when Izaya came and stood in front of him, his feet only a step away from the other guy's face. Shazesh understood and tried to look up, struggling while coughing blood and convulsing. The pain was so intense that it just didn't feel real at the moment.

So close. He was so close!

That was the only thing he could think of as his eyes traveled up to Izaya's body, finally reaching his unreadable face. He was so close of achieving undeniable recognition! He was so close of standing on top of everyone! He was so close of obtaining everything! He was so close of taking Izaya and making him his!

Where? Where had it gone wrong?

And suddenly, Izaya's lips twisted it up in a wide, wolfish grin, as his eyes narrowed in pure malice. In the next two seconds Shazesh had left to live, he understood everything, but he didn't even have the time to get angry. As he watched in terror the devil smiling down at him, with eyes that gleamed red, he passed away drown in feelings of betrayal and self-loathing, and the image of his older sister, with a cigarette in her hands, telling him she would reward his pure love if he just got her those dreamy blue pills that take you up away in the sky.

When Izaya watched the light extinguishing from the other man's eyes, he had the irresistible urge to laugh like there was no tomorrow. It was extremely hard to restrain himself. It was even harder to stop himself from starting stomping on Shazesh's head and bashing it into the ground. He had hoped for an infuriated reaction instead of an awed one, but the man hadn't had that much time to live, as it seemed.

Well, whatever. He could go and apologize to all that 'meat', as he had said, in the depths of hell, if it existed. Izaya had now other, more important things to occupy himself with, as he glanced towards Shizuo's side.

It would be one day later that Shizuo would open his eyes. Of course, he couldn't know how much time had passed. He just opened his eyes and found himself looking at the ceiling of the tent. He tried to stand up in a sitting position but his body felt uncharacteristically heavy as he rose. He looked down and found himself covered all over in bandages.

"Uh-uh, Shizu-chan, you shouldn't get up yet!" A very familiar voice chirped next to him.

"Huuuh? I told you to not call me by that name, you fucking bastard!" Shizuo turned right and came face to face with the object of his eternal, as it seemed, irritation, which was sitting next to him and smiling like Christmas had arrived six months earlier… not that he knew what Christmas was. "What the hell happened? Why do I look like the fucking mummy?"

"Whose mom?" Izaya was momentarily taken aback.

"Not THAT mommy! Mummy! It… forget it!" Shizuo could easily forget that Izaya still didn't know everything about his world. As he shook his head, he realized that he had bandages wrapped even around his neck. Then he remembered the feeling of the knife on his throat, and everything slowly started falling back into place. "Shit…" He whispered, as he closed his eyes, reminiscing of those appalling memories. "Shit… Those bastards…"

"I see your vocabulary is as rich as always."

"Do you want to die, HUH?" Shizuo reacted automatically at the usual sarcasm, but when he tried to raise his hand to threaten that insect with a punch, it felt like it weighted tones. "What the FUCK! I can't even-"

"No, Shizu-chan was injured quite heavily in this incident." Izaya said, unable to refrain from smiling and not willing to hide it either. "That being said, I'm under the pleasant position to take care of you until you recover! Shizu-chan might be a monster so he doesn't feel any pain, but the doctor said that your condition is actually pretty bad, so you need to let yourself in my hands for now! Amazing, isn't it?"

"Please, hide your tears. Your concern about my wellbeing is so heart breaking, I don't know if I can handle it!" Shizuo replied, with a vein popping dangerously on his forehead. "You bastard! Is it so pleasant for you that I ended up in this mess, huh?"

"Now you're offending me!" Izaya said as he got up, and dusted himself off a bit, still smiling. "I told you that I need you, Shizu-chan. Why would I enjoy it if something bad happened to you?" He said as he turned around, and headed towards where they kept their supplies. "Although I admit," he cut Shizuo off the moment he opened his mouth to retort, "that it was nice to see you in my place for a change. Well… not exactly… nice… but you know what I mean." He concluded, the smile barely remaining on his lips, as he looked through the food they had.

Shizuo huffed. "And just what's telling you that I hadn't already been in that place."

He watched Izaya's back as the black haired man completely froze. "What do you mean?" His merry tone was suddenly gone.

"Get real! I came in this place when I was sixteen!" Shizuo shot at him, while suddenly wishing for a cigarette. "I've lost count of the times scums have tried to get me! When I first came here, that must have been the time when I was most scolded. I kept beating them next to death. Most of them gave up when I grew up a little, but from time to time there are idiots like that… where did you put my cigarettes?"

"Did anyone succeed?" Izaya's voice was unusually serious.

"What? Do you know me? Of course not!" Shizuo exclaimed. " …But I have to confess that this last one was a closer call than anything ever before." He involuntarily shuddered at the thought, but he was capable of hiding it. Izaya had his back turned at him anyway. "That damn Shazesh… stealing that grenade… this was far more serious for the army than doing me or getting me out of the way. I can't tell if he was being brave or plain stupid!"

"Why is a grenade more serious?" Izaya asked, as he returned next to Shizuo, holding a canteen. "In your world, objects are weighing more than human lives?" He asked as he sat beside him again.

Shizuo looked at him like he knew that Izaya was mocking him, thing that he ninety-nine per cent did. "Why? In your world it was different?"

Izaya looked at him. "Shizu-chan says some good stuff from time to time." He said, as he untapped the canteen.

"What the hell was good from what you heard." Shizuo commented but without any irritation in his voice. "To make things short; my life wouldn't cost one tenth of what one of those grenades would."

"Then Shizu-chan is lucky to have such good friends that rushed to his rescue. Even with the grenade used… right?"

Shizuo didn't say anything. He didn't like Izaya's tone, and more, he absolutely hated his roundabout ways. He kept looking at him with narrowed eyes, until Izaya opened his mouth to speak again, swiftly beating him to it. "When you said you needed me… before I left…" He questioned. "What did you mean by that?"

"I don't know. What could I have possibly meant?"

"Answer me."

"I'm not answering things you already know." Izaya maintained his smile, but his eyes hardened imperceptibly. "If you cease to be here, I'll become a fuck toy of nearly five hundred men. Or if you simply decide to give me away. I need you. I can't save myself in any other way. You are not fucking me, though, and that means you don't actually need me, in any way, so I'm left depending on the good will of a monster. That's what I meant."

"I'll never be a human being for you, will I? Not that I care." Shizuo shrugged. "It's fine. I'm not asking you to change your opinion, in fact, that would be weird." In absolute fact, his own words were weird to Shizuo's ears, since it wasn't even his opinion. "Where did you put my cigarettes?" He asked again.

Izaya was left speechless for some seconds, but then decided to lessen the tension a bit. "I'll give them to you later. Now you've got to eat something." He handed him the canteen. "Drink, it's soup. You've been out cold for an entire day, they said it's better if you drink that first."

Shizuo silently took the canteen and started drinking, first quietly and then, unbelievably hungrily. He had forgotten how much hungry he actually was, he hadn't even eaten anything after the battle. As he drunk, he couldn't help but think that he was extremely lucky to be able to taste this soup. He might have died back then. He was a soldier and yet he hadn't learned that every day could be his last, as it seemed. And he had never before thought about it. Due to his strength, he found himself under the illusion of safety, and that proved to be very wrong. He didn't have anything particular to do with his life, but still, he wanted to live another day. He felt like he had things he wanted to do, even if he didn't know them exactly yet.

When he finished, he gave the canteen at Izaya, and turned his attention back at him. They might not be alive to see the next day, either one of them. And then… what?

When Izaya tried to get up and put the object in his hands back in his place, Shizuo grabbed him by the hand, right above the wrist. "What?" Izaya asked, a bit bewildered. "Oh!" He realized. "I'll get your cigarettes, don't worry."

"I don't want any cigarettes."

Izaya lifted up his eyebrow. "Really? Since when?"

"Okay, I DO, but that's not what I meant!" Damn him and his games with words. "Izaya…"

"What do you want, Shizu-chan?" Izaya sighed, exasperated. From time to time, Shizuo acted like a child.

"I have been wondering… what do you like the most?"

"Humans and fatty tuna, and you're neither." Izaya gave a deadpan reply, as he shook his hand away from Shizuo's grasp with a swift movement. Of course that would have been impossible if Shizuo hadn't let go of his own. "What does Shizu-chan like the most though? Not that I really care." He asked as he got up to finally put the canteen back.

Shizuo mumbled something that Izaya didn't hear, and since he was convinced that it was curses towards his person, he didn't even ask again. He simply returned, handed Shizuo his cigarettes, and then casually tried to get into the sheets and lie next to him. "What are you doing?" Shizuo asked, a bit surprised.

"Since someone was in bad condition for so many hours, I actually haven't had enough sleep since then." Izaya informed him. "Smoke in here if you want, I'm used to it anyway. Just let me sleep for some time, okay?"

"Okay. I will." Shizuo nodded. "If you answer me two questions."

"What." Izaya said through gritted teeth. He really hadn't slept at all. He had spent all those hours next to Shizuo, hoping that no one who would be suddenly feeling sympathetic towards Shazesh would come to deal with them both. It was an absurd thought, but not one he could suppress with logic, even if he was willing to take the risk from the start. And now, for a reason, he suddenly felt extremely tired, even though he was so hyper when Shizuo finally woke up.

"What happened to Shazesh and his gang?"

"They all died. Commander Tom ordered to shoot them the moment they pointed their guns at you. Nobody survived."

"I see." Shizuo simply said. "And one last thing." Izaya kept silent so he continued: "What job did you do before we came here? What did you work as?"

Izaya turned and looked up at him from his lying down position, genuinely surprised. "What good would it do for you to know that?"

"I just want to know. Is it that bad?"

"You know, it is, since you pretty much came and destroyed everything!"

"Don't start acting all sentimental on me! Like you cared!"

"Hmm? So Shizu-chan has such a bad opinion of me that he thinks I'm fine even if you barge into my world, kill and rape everyone around me, taking away my freedom and preventing me from seeing everyone I ever knew ever again. Is that right?" Beneath Izaya's calm façade, his boiling anger was slowly emerging. He knew that he shouldn't keep up with it, because otherwise, even if Shizuo was injured, he could easily end up with his head bashed into the ground.

"Not fine, but…" This was one of the rarest times Shizuo didn't want to start a fight. "Whatever, just go to sleep." He eventually gave up, lighting up his cigarette and trying to exhale the smoke away from Izaya. He was too wounded to get up and get out, that he could understand, but he also just had too much sleep to lie down again. Plus, the sun was up and it bothered him to no end. So he just decided he would stay sitting next to Izaya for the time being.

"Shizu-chan."

"What?"

"Nothing."

"Are you TRYING to make me hit you?" Shizuo finally snapped. "Okay! Alright! Enough! I get it! I'm not asking you anything ever again! Happy? Now, are you happy?"

When Izaya started laughing, it baffled Shizuo to no end. Like many things Izaya did, but Shizuo had the vague feeling that if he always assumed the worst, it would be the right guess. And now the worst guess was that Izaya was just messing with him, like always, as he kept laughing on and on and on. "Really, Shizu-chan, you're so cute sometimes!"

"Fuck you!"

"Yeah, yeah, okay!" Izaya managed to say between giggles, wiping slightly the corners of his eyes were tears from the intense laughter had gathered, while Shizuo was doing an internal countdown until the punch would escape him. "Anyway. I wasn't doing anything flashy, or grandiose like your kind. I was just… let's say… running some errands for some people slightly more important than me? It's not that much different than what I'm… trying to do now."

Shizuo narrowed his eyes. "You know the word 'grandiose' after two months and then you're trying to make me believe that you weren't doing something important?"

"Ah, I told you Shizu-chan. We're not the same as you. The fact that I wasn't working in the fields to grow a grain of rice or wrestle with the waves to catch a tiny fish all year long, in order to have something to eat, is saying something. Plus, I thought I told you; Fear is one of the greatest teachers."

"You didn't have to be afraid. I told you I would protect you!" Shizuo protested. Okay they fought a lot but Tom had given him a certain order.

Izaya buried his face in the pillow in pure exasperation. "Yes, Shizu-chan. You're so reliable! I think we still have that one crater you opened in the ground next to my ear last time."

"You can dodge. It's fine."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"And you're asking for it."

"We've had this conversation before and it didn't end well. Let me sleep."

"IIIIIIIZAAAAAAYAAA YOU BASTARD, YOU ARE THE ONE WHO-"

As Kadota happened to walk near the tent, the voices reached his ears once again. One day break was over, now things would start to get livelier once again. God help them.


End file.
